


Learn with The Professor!

by baruffio



Category: Puppet History (Web Series), The Magic Schoolbus - Fandom, Watcher Entertainment RPF
Genre: A Cornucopia of Crazy, But Not Like The Horrors of High School, Embedded Video, Except for the Literal Ones Which Sink, High School, Horror, I Mean Maybe A Little But That's More Subtext, Puppets, We're All Puppets Here, jellybeans, no ships here, teacher!Madej
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24675298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baruffio/pseuds/baruffio
Summary: This is literally the Puppet History series, but with a few variations:1. Shane is a high school teacher.2. The guests on Puppet History are students in Madej's history class.3. Whoever loses has to remain on as a guest for the next lesson.4. The guests in Puppet History turnintoactualpuppetsandliveoutpuppetfieddangersintheepisode.5. The danger is real.And some things remain the same.1. Ryan never wins.(2. Sometimes, he doesn't want to.)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 35





	1. The Theme Song

**Author's Note:**

> AN: Do you ever get an idea that's so ridiculous you gotta do it? Well, that's this. You can tell it's especially ridiculous because I covered a song / made a trailer for my fanfic. What the heck, self?


	2. Life During the Black Plague Pandemic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first episode of Puppet History, only it's a horrifying show targeting Ryan.

Ryan Bergara never anticipated missing 4th grade field trips. He’s always been a little jumpy, and the trips had always been so intense. Honestly, he doesn’t remember half the stuff he learned on those things because of the, you know, inherent trauma. 

Nowadays, that level of trauma seems like a pleasant yet unattainable daydream.

“Welcome one and all to Puppet History,” Madej announces, taking long strides through the door as soon as the bell rings. “Today we’ll be taking another ever-winding look at another chapter in that heavy, heavy book we call history while our guests ruthlessly compete for the coveted title of History Master. Put on those question caps aaaaaand...Let’s crack in!”

Steven promptly puts his pencil pouch on his head. He’s always been an insufferable suck-up. 

“Today, we’re talking about unimaginable catastrophe, of devastation so swift and sweeping that it could easily be mistaken as nothing short of the apocalypse.”

Ryan slouches deeper into his seat, wishing he could just slide out of sight and out of mind. But no matter Ryan’s reaction at the start of lesson, the end result is always the same.

“Ry-an,” Madej says with that weird, lilting inflection and unnecessary emphasis on both syllables of his name. “Would you fetch me The Professor?”

Ryan swallows hard. “Y-yeah.” God, he hates that he’s stuttering in anticipation. He’s getting himself too psyched up. He needs to stay cool, level-headed. This has got to stop. He’s got to win this time. This has to be the end.

Ryan lifts the velvet bundle from the leather case on the bookshelf in the back of the room and drags his feet approaching Madej’s desk.

“Thank you,” Madej says. There’s no malice in his voice, nothing to indicate the insanity roiling just under the surface. He carefully unwraps The Professor from the red curtain and holds him like he’s a living thing, supporting the head. “Who will you be challenging today?”

“Steven,” Ryan says with the barest touch of spite. Steven’s already gotten on his nerves a couple of times today. There’s a smattering of applause as Steven pops to his feet and takes an awkward bow.

“On to those seats, boys,” Madej says like they’re game show contestants. Ryan, mouth dry, heads to what has, unofficially, become his seat: the first of the two thrones at the front of the classroom. He avoids watching as Madej animates The Professor and, with zero vocal differentiation and not even the slightest attempt of ventriloquy, begins his lesson. “To set the mood, a reading from _The Signs of Death_ , a cheery Middle English lyric.”

Ryan shivers, and he’s not sure if it has more to do with the sardonic edge to the word “cheery” or the familiar slight give of the green velvet cushion under his ass. He stares stubbornly out at the class, refusing to look at The Professor.

“When the head trembles, and the lips grow black, the nose sharpens, and the sinews stiffen...the soul has left, and the body holds nothing but a clout-- Then will the body be thrown in a hole and no one! Will remember! Your soul!”

Madej finishes his jilted reading with a sharp look upward, and a giggle violently erupts from Steven when his glasses slip off the tip of his nose. Madej flails to catch them before they hit the floor. His fingers fumble the catch, and the soft _plink_ of them hitting the floor is, by far, the loudest sound in the classroom. Madej regards them all sourly, as if daring anyone to express an iota of mirth.

Ryan puts his hand up like a blinder to avoid looking towards Madej. The man is ridiculous every single damn day, he doesn’t need to look at this particular instance. It doesn’t mean that he’s not gonna say something though. 

“Hey, teach. Your, uh, your glasses fell off.” He keeps his voice as neutral and level as possible.

“I was just getting really into it,” Madej explains. He doesn’t need to explain. The whole damn class knows how excited he is about the puppet shows, even if they don’t fully understand what they entail. “Hang on.”

In the echoing silence of the room, Madej reaches down to the floor to retrieve his glasses, keeping The Professor upright, and practically yells, “We’re talking about the malady of many names! The big sick! The great mortality. The bubonic plague! A terrifying, rapidly-traveling, biological nightmare that brought 14th century mankind to its knees. What do you guys know about this thing?”

“I know very little. I just know it was devastating,” Steven offers. 

Ryan rolls his eyes. Talk about a weak response. That’s literally the first thing Madej had said when talking about today’s lesson. Eyes focused fastidiously at a point in the back of the classroom, Ryan slaps out a clearly superior answer.

“The Great Plague made people cough up blood, and then they had to bury them in pits and set the pits on fire so they wouldn’t contaminate others. But great plague though.” And then Ryan’s stupid, stupid brain decides to make an aside to Madej, who is straightening up with his reclaimed glasses grasped tight. “The idea of using _great_ as an adjective has always been curious to me.”

Shit. Ryan snaps his eyes back to the back wall of the classroom, but it’s too late. Way too damn late. He’s empty, sagging uncontrollably, and has only the crudest control over his body.

The Professor hums in agreement. “Like World War I, the Great War?”

Ryan looks down at his hands. They’re green and fuzzy, nubs instead of palms and fingers. 

“Yeah, it was no good,” The Professor says jovially. 

No shit. 

“A good question to kick this thing off is probably, _Where did this thing come from, and how’d it turn into such a go-getter?_ ”

It’s technically two questions, but Ryan is a little too distracted about imminently getting yoinked into puppet Middle Ages to make his usual sassy commentary. At his side, Steven is oohing and aahing at his purple felt body. The novelty wears off pretty fuckin’ fast though. 

“Well, nobody’s certain, but most put the plague’s origin somewhere in the remote regions of Mongolia. Based on contemporary reports of mysterious maladies, it may have spent some time bouncing around smaller populations in northern China in the 1330s but would really explode in 1347.

“And as for its biological tenacity, before we understand anything about the plague, we must first understand three key organisms in this global dance of death. Bacteria, the flea, and the rat. You guys get rats?”

The Professor says it as if their high school doesn’t have a long and well-documented history of rat infestations. In freshman year, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Ryan quickly came to understand the difference between middle school teachers and high school teachers when a rat fell through the ceiling onto Kate’s desk and the teacher literally knocked over Jermaine to get out the door first, all the while screaming, “Every man for himself!”

The Professor creaks out a little laugh before continuing on with his lesson. “The plague as we know it is caused by a little bacteria called _yersinia pestis_ , a very tough little guy. Not only can it be spread by fleas, it can be spread by twenty-one different species of fleas. According to author John Kelly, it can infect rats, squirrels, gerbils, prairie dogs, and roughly two hundred other rodent species.”

“Oh, wow,” Steven says.

Fully resigned to participate in yet another uncomfortably immersive lesson, Ryan slides to the edge of his throne. His little fluffy legs flop down bonelessly. Every time, the lurching feeling of dysmorphia hits him as hard as it had at the first, but he can’t let that phase him. He’s got to focus. He’s got to win. He’s got to escape. “So this pesky bacteria was actually called pest?”

“Pestis,” The Professor corrects. His spectacles start to slide off his nose. “Yeah.”

“Is that actually where ‘pest’ derives from?”

The Professor stares soulessly at Ryan, mawl gaping and index finger eternally pointed. “Maybe.” 

“Your glasses fell off,” Ryan informs him out of desperate need to cut into the oppressive silence. 

“Oh no, your glasses!” Steven echoes.

The Professor swears and Ryan, with no shortage of vindictiveness, says, “I think you need to get fitted for your nose a little better.” It’s just really nice to see evidence that being a puppet isn’t a cakewalk for The Professor either. Apparently he’s pushing the envelope too far though, because The Professor sets his dead-eyed, voluminous sight upon Ryan and continues in an unsettling cavalier tone.

“So most of those, hey, who cares, I mean the world wasn’t overrun with prairie dogs in the 1300's, would have been pretty cool, though, right?”

There’s a jarring discrepancy between the unrepentant, borderline malicious glare, and the jaunty voice. Ryan’s mouth goes dry. Damn it. That’s not something easily fixed as a puppet. Ryan swallows, or rather, clamps his mouth closed. “Sure.”

“I’d love it.” The Professor’s mouth opens wide enough that Ryan can see the crease at the back of his mouth. “Rats, though! Rats are the big problem here, specifically _rattus rattus_ , the black rat: nearly invincible rodent that can sire millions of offspring and chew through, among other things, lead pipes. And when you put three of those things together, there’s this nasty little biological menage à trois that goes down. AH!”

Steven jumps and nearly falls off his chair as the whole classroom flashes red. Ryan can see him looking up at the fluorescent light bulbs, trying to make sense of the lighting change. He feels a moment of pity for Steven. They never know what they’re getting into when they step forward to take their seat in Puppet History. It hasn’t even really started yet.

“The red light can only mean that we arrived at our first question. What do you think happens when an infected flea crosses paths with a rat?”

Ryan hauls the answer board from the side pocket. It’s really hard to do with no fingers, but Ryan’s had enough experience to get it out on his first attempt. Steven is still fishing for his board as The Professor lists the answer options.

“A, the infected flea burrows into the rat and dies there; B, the infected flea vomits into the rat; or C, the infected flea sits in the rat’s brain and controls it like that little guy in Men in Black.”

He always does this, and Ryan hates it. There will be three answers, and one answer will be clearly wrong. Although that statistically should put Ryan at an advantage, he practically never gets these questions correct. And then, sometimes, the obviously wrong answer is the right one. It’s impossible.

Ryan immediately starts sucking up. It’s not 100% effective, but sometimes The Professor is amenable to flattery. “I like this quill.”

Steven, ever insufferable, promptly and enthusiastically says, “I love it!” while double-pawing his feathered marker in the singular delight of a teacher’s pet. Objectively speaking, it’s a fun prop, but Ryan has to say the overall experience puts a bit of a damper on the simple joy of writing with a feather. Ryan writes his answer with practiced moves. Steven is struggling immensely to manipulate his marker-quill.

“While you fill out your answers, I’ll show you what you’re playing for here.”

“That’s what I want to know,” Steven says. He’s already gunning to win. Ryan has _got_ to take him down.

“Behold! The Coveted Cup of the History Master.” The trophy elevates midair next to The Professor, twinkling innocently in the bright red light.

Ryan’s hard eyes glint in the light of the cup. He will win it today. He must.

“How is that suspended?” Steven asks. “Where’s your hand?”

Ryan laughs brokenly, his jaw hinging with the movement. If Steven were a little more observant, he might have realized that Madej is completely out of sight, that the rest of the class is sliding away, that underneath their seats, foam cobblestones are slowly coalescing when linoleum once was. But it always takes some time for the competitors to notice, they always get distracted by their new bodies and The Professor’s storytelling. To be fair, it’s hard to notice things that you’re not looking at directly when your pupils are quite literally frozen in place.

The Professor completely ignores Steven’s question. As The Coveted Cup of the History Master sinks out of sight, he turns conversationally towards the thrones. “Bet you guys want to win that, huh?”

Ryan shrugs his body and tries desperately to sound casual when he says, “Yeah, sure man.” In hindsight, Steven might not have been the best pick. The guy is crazy competitive, and Ryan does not need the guy setting his eyes on this particular prize.

“Ryan, what’d you put?”

“I put A,” Ryan says, struggling to lift his board between his two nubby arms. “But I would very much like it to be C because that’s more novel to me.” The Professor is ever finicky: if it is, by wild chance, C, Ryan might get some credit towards the final tally.

“Very good,” The Professor says, showing no indication of the accuracy of Ryan’s answer. “Steven?”

Steven manages to prop his answer board up on his legs which, huh, that’s actually a great idea. Ryan’s totally going to do that next time. “I put A as well because I cannot imagine a flea vomiting after a night of love.”

It is a pretty funny thing to imagine. “A little puke puddle,” Ryan says agreeably. It’s a major inconvenience that Steven also picked the right answer, but Ryan supposes it’s nice to know that he’s not behind in points.

The Professor laughs and mumbles something about the puke puddle, and Ryan’s blood runs cold because The Professor laughing is rarely a good sign. Or, at least, Ryan imagines the sensation of his center freezing over. The biometrics are confusing as a puppet. 

“Well, let’s find out!”

With an elaborate shrug, The Professor pulls a curtain out of thin air and twirls into it. The curtain keeps undulating, covering a space narrower than The Professor’s body. If Ryan currently had bowels, they would most certainly be tightening. He learned pretty early on that, when the Professor makes a sudden disappearance, danger is on the way.

And honestly, disappear is probably--scratch that, definitely-- the wrong word for it. There’s nothing subtle about the clanging and banging that accompanies his escape from the scene that he and Steven are about to be afflicted with.

“Jesus,” Ryan says, and he’s honestly not sure if he speaks more in jest or prayer. “Someone’s just shot The Professor. I think he got hit by a sniper.”

Steven ignores him. He’s never fully appreciated Ryan’s commentaries. “What’s the name of that trophy we’re winning?”

Ryan seizes the opportunity to downplay the competition. “I forgot already.” He very casually rubs his nose. But damn it, that only tickles. Now he’s stuck with the unachievable need to sneeze.

The thrones tilt forward, sending Ryan and Steven toppling into a 16th century puppet Europe that has finally finished forming underseat. The curtain floats down with them before twisting and disappearing into thin air, revealing a rodent that would be cute if it weren’t literally the size of Ryan. His beady, solid black eyes glint dully behind crooked whiskers. Ryan automatically goes to take a step back, but he can’t. He’s rooted in place, foot well and truly sunk into a gutter of literal shit. The smell alone is enough to have Ryan gagging, but the way it oozes into his fur is a next-tier abomination. 

“Ooooh,” the mouse chortles. “Heh, heh.”

“Oh, wow,” Ryan says. He distantly hears Steven echoing his sentiments. The mouse’s mouth isn’t moving, but from his flailing gestures, it’s apparent that he’s the source of the voice. 

“Oh, gosh, what a lovely night!” the mouse continues. “Uhhhhh-I don’t know how a rat like me got so lucky, livin’ in a time like this, when the streets are absolutely caked with scum.”

Ryan’s bottom jaw drops onto his chest in disbelief. “That’s a rat?” 

Steven has his head cocked quizzically. “This is a…”

“Yeah, I’m a rat!” the mouse insists.

“...an attempt at a Brooklyn accent?” Steven finishes. 

Ryan has a sudden and very urgent need to roll his eyes. It distracts him momentarily from the inability to sneeze. It’s not uncommon for newbies to try and explain away the puppet world, to try to make connections to the real world. Of course Steven Lim would be the one to fixate on something as incidental as accents.

“Hee hee? What?”

“Kinda looks like a kangaroo,” Ryan piles on.

“Like a kanga--” the mouse retorts indignantly. “Didn’t you ever--” 

“Your voice changed,” Steven points out. 

“Huh? Nawww!” the mouse protests. Ryan has to admit, he’s really enjoying watching the puppet crumble under critique. It makes the overall experience significantly less intimidating.

“You went from Brooklyn accent to timid mouse-in-the-house.”

Ryan stage whispers, “I think this rat’s workshopping accents on the fly.”

The mouse straightens up to its full, considerable height. “Hey, boy with the strawberry hair, what’s your name?” 

Ryan flings his body back and forth to look from the mouse to Steven and back again. Steven’s a goner for sure. 

“Oh, I’m...uh…” Steven’s clearly working on some sort of stage name. He figures one out fairly quickly. “Big Apple Steve.”

“Oh, Big Apple. Where they got the Broadway?”

Steven flops his head in agreement. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Hey,” the mouse continues, and Ryan already knows that this scene is not going to end well for Steven, “when you go to Broadway, do you yell at the people on stage?”

“Uh….” Steven’s bravado has failed him. “No.”

“I’m in the middle of a scene!” the mouse screeches.

“Sorry.”

“Thank you!”

“Apologies to the r...mouse?”

Ryan has no idea where the sass came from, but he’s staying out of this one.

“Where was I?” The mouse shakes itself out before starting anew with a little more vigor. “GOSH! What a lovely night!”

A giant, two-dimensional flea turns out of thin air. It’s at least the size of Ryan’s head, with spindly, waving legs and unsettlingly sharp stylets protruding from its mouth.

“Oh, hey,” the flea rasps.

“Oh, well,” the mouse chirps. “If it ain’t my old pal, Mr. Flea. Here to deliver one of his classic bites, no doubt. Well have at it, you pesky devil!”

The flea begins grunting and groaning, not unlike a guy turning into a zombie. Ryan stares, transfixed, and all too aware of Steven watching gleefully beside him, not knowing how seriously to take the production.

“Hey, Mr. Flea. Ya….heh, heh...ya don’t look so good. You eat some bad sushi or something?”

Steven breathes a half-laugh right before the flea begins vomiting gratuitously, bright red blood spewing all over the fur of the mouse. 

“No way!” Steven shouts. The flea continues vomiting, and Ryan backs away from Steven as he incredulously yelps, “It vomits?!” 

The flea, continuously upchucking a geyser of infected blood, turns toward Steven, splattering his face and open mouth. It smells rancid and coppery, and Steven just stands there dumbly, painted with flea vomit and horrified shock.

“Oh my god,” Ryan says. He gags reflexively, but of course, he can’t do anything. He can’t even get air out. He does some slow counts so he doesn’t hyperventilate, which is an infinity loop in a puppet body. He’s had to learn that the hard way.

“Ah!” the mouse cries. He clearly gives zero fucks about Steven, which, honestly, Ryan can totally understand given that the mouse is considerably worse off. “Did you just bite me and then also vomit onto me?”

The flea violently vomits yet again, and the mouse flails in distress. “This is not what friends dooooooooo!”

Steven trembles as a red curtain wraps up the mouse and flea, transporting them out of sight. “Remember how I said I uh...I can’t picture a flea vomiting?” He gestures bonelessly at his face. “Yeah.”

Ryan snorts despite himself. “He did a good job of making you picture it.” There’s a hit to the back of his knees that totally wipes out his legs, but it’s just the thrones swooping in to scoop them back up. There’s the uncomfortable plummeting sensation of his nonexistent innards as they are rocketed upright, seated about roof-level over the town.

“Yeah, actually,” Steven says. The blood that covered his face half a second ago has vanished without trace, and there’s no sign of the turd that had been tangled in Ryan’s foot fur. “I get it now, yeah.” Ryan reckons that he’s probably talking about more than the concept of flea vomit. His musings are interrupted by The Professor reappearing on a balcony with a curtain flourish and a grunt.

“OH! Jesus Christ!”

“Well,” The Professor says with absolute nonchalance, “turns out it vomits into, uh, that old funny rat, so I guess neither of you get points.”

“Ah, man,” Steven says. Ryan is clueless as to how the guy could still be concerned about points after having blood vomited all over him unless... maybe Steven already realizes the importance of winning,comprehends the true stakes, understands that the trophy is his way out of this nightmare. That would be not good. That would be very not good.

“Ohhh, wow,” Ryan says, struggling to get his head back in the game. “So it bites the rat and then vomits into the wound.”

The Professor nods in agreement. His entire body jerks with the motion. “Yes, yes, what you witnessed there, what happens is the plague bacteria infects the flea, causes a buildup to form in the flea’s gut--” He flourishes a comically enormous diagram of a flea that fills the entire landscape-- “which causes two bad things: one, the flea never actually ingests anything and therefore, desperately continues to bite whatever it can; and two, without any gut to go to, the blood, now infected, is then vomited back into the bite, almost ensuring the spread of ol’ yersinia pestis.”

Ryan’s earlier thought about zombies was very much apropos then, albeit in the wrong direction. “Good old fashioned double tap.”

“Yeah!” The Professor sounds pleased with Ryan’s analysis, and Ryan can practically taste today’s imminent victory. “So ya take that lethal cocktail, add in a few environmental factors: some historians point to that region experiencing earthquakes, floods, famines in the 1330s and 1340s, events very likely to drive rats out of their natural habitats in search of food. On top of that, you suddenly have trade routes spanning continents. So now any rats stowed away in a loose sack of grain might end up halfway across the hemisphere in a matter of weeks. QUESTION!”

Ryan and Steven jump as the sun swirls into deep crimson and the streets are bathed in red light. 

“What other horrific factor contributed to the plague?” The Professor chirps. “A, the popularity of a dish called rat pie; B, the streets being caked in piles of innards; or C, the rising belief that flea bites were gifts from God.”

“Ohhhhh!” Steven hums, struggling with his marker-quill. “This one’s easy.”

No kidding. They had just been in the street. Ryan should hope Steven finds this question easy. 

“Ryan,” The Professor calls the moment Ryan has set down his marker-quill. 

Ryan heaves his board around and props it upright against his torso. “I’m gonna go with B. Most of those European streets back in the day were caked with poop.”

“Steven-” The Professor starts, but Ryan hasn’t finished showing off his wealth of poop history knowledge carefully curated over years of reading the Poop Facts! book on the back of the commode in the guest bathroom. 

“That’s actually how a lot of artifacts got preserved,” Ryan says, quite knowledgeably. How’s that for History Master, eh?

“I’m going with B as in Bergara as well,” Steven chimes in. 

“A couple of B boys!” The Professor says delightedly. He doesn’t say it very loudly, but an echo nonetheless rumbles ominously through the abandoned streets, pitched a full octave lower. 

**_B-BOYS_ **

“Double Bs,” Ryan agrees. Damn it. He’s got to shake Lim off somewhere, and that’s not going to happen if they keep picking the same answer.

“Well,” The Professor continues blaisely as the sun blinks back to soft yellow, “author John Kelly paints a lovely picture. Quote, ‘In most cities, the butchers’ district was a Goya-eque horror of animal remains. Rivers of blood seeped into nearby gardens and parks, and piles of hearts, livers, and intestines accumulated under the butchers’ bloody boots, attracting swarms of rat--”

“Wait,” Steven interrupts. Ryan flings his body around to glare at him. The guy has no self preservation! “Hold up, hold up, hold up. This seems a little lazy.”

What the hell? When did Lim get so snarky?

The Professor’s hard eyes fixate on Steven. “Huh?” Ryan hears it and recognizes the warning, the _I’ll give you one more chance to check yourself before I check you_.

“We’re not gonna get a little skit here or anything?”

“We got more skits coming,” The Professor says.

“I feel like I need a skit right now.”

Ryan cannot even begin to imagine the cajones on Steven Lim. The Professor is looking pretty unsettled by this turn of events. Ryan’s kinda a fan of that.

“That’s a lot of pr...uh….uh...okay. Hang on.”

Steven hurls his body sideways to look at Ryan. “Man, did I really just cause him to skit this?”

Ryan is not sure whether Steven is a very brave man or an incredibly stupid one. Still grappling with the powerplay he’s just witnessed, he mutters, “I think he’s improvising.” He’s barely finished speaking when their thrones tip forward, dumping them back onto the putrid streets. A man comes hurdling full-speed down the road, grunting with exertion and slowing down as he approaches. Ryan eyes him warily.

“Wow, what a lovely day!” The man yelps, right before stepping squarely in the middle of a heap of shit. It makes a squelching sound that Ryan can’t help but to laugh at. “Oooooops! I stepped in some poop.”

Ryan hardly notices the thrones scooping them back up because he’s still cracking up about the utter pointlessness of the scene they just witnessed.

“Was it worth it?” The Professor demands as he re-emerges from his red curtain. 

Steven still looks a little perplexed about the sudden jump into and out of a scene. “Huh?”

“No!” Ryan says, still giggling. 

“Did you feel like you were transported to another time?” The Professor presses. He sounds in good enough humor that Ryan risks ribbing him.

“Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? Not me, but that’s Big Apple Steve right there. He hails from Broadway. He’s, uh, he’s a high-theatre critic.”

“That’s...Yeah, well….”

Ryan doesn’t reckon he’s ever seen The Professor so at loss for words. 

“It’s true,” Steven affirms. He scooches his little puppet butt back in the chair. “I’ve seen Wicked before.”

The Professor tosses his head and continues on unabated. “Well, as stated, there was also the issue of torrential downpour of human feces as it was customary for residents to empty chamber pots out of the window.”

Ryan responds automatically. “Gross.”

“There was one generally accepted rule of thumb when tossing those turds.” The sun ruddies again, and all three of them shout in disjointed surprise. It’s moments like these when Ryan questions how much control The Professor has over the proceedings. 

“OH!”

“Wha-oh!”

“Oh!”

“Question time!”

The Professor throws them a stern look to see if they’ve settled down before asking, “Can you guess the socially expected courtesy when tossing your turds? Write your answers.” Steven oohes. “I will not give you multiple choice this time.”

“Wha…” Steven starts. “How do you toss turds?”

Christ, Steven is being difficult today.

“You throw them out your window,” The Professor answers somberly.

Steven’s head rolls over his left shoulder. “Can you sketch that for me?” Ryan pauses mid-scribble to grapple with the attitude of one Steven Lim. “Actually, don’t do that please.”

It’s like Steven’s out here actively trying to put a target on his back. Ryan doesn’t get it, but he’s sure as hell not complaining. 

“Alright, Ryan,” The Professor says. “What did you put?”

Ryan works carefully to flip his board without erasing anything. It’s frustratingly difficult to do with fur. “I would say that you need to say a phrase or something to alert said pedestrian that a turd’s about to hit them in their heads.”

“Sorta like a ‘fore!’” 

“Hey!” Steven perks up at that.

“So,” Ryan continues, “I went with tally-ho, or I also thought about ‘Bombs away!’”

“Sure,” The Professor says. “Tally-ho. Here comes a poop. Steven?”

Steven triumphantly reveals his board. “I went with poop-fore.”

“Poop-fore,” The Professor repeats thoughtfully. “That’s good.”

“And that’s probably where that came from in golf, if this is accurate.”

The Professor hems and haws, and Ryan holds on to the shred of hope that Steven has oversold his poop-slinging slogan.

“The common courtesy was to shout, ‘Look out below!’ not once, but three times.”

“Oh,” Steven says. He probably had convinced himself that he actually had something bordering on the correct answer.

“Then you go ahead and loose your stools upon the world. I’m gonna give that point to Ryan--”

“What?!” Steven roars.

“--because I think ‘tally-ho’ is a little more fun than poop-fore.”

Ryan crows while Steven, glowering, defiantly repeats his answer with vigor. “Poop-fore!”

“Poop-fore,” The Professor repeats unanimatedly.

“Hey,” Steven says. “Four is like almost three.”

“Alright, moving along: the whole apocalyptic horror show really kicked off in October of 1347 when twelve Genoese ships pulled into a Sicilian port and the men who got off were pus and bones. They were just walking skeletons, basically.”

Ryan nods sagely. “Oh, like Pirates of the Caribbean. Black Pearl.”

The Professor looks ready to agree when Steven interjects with, “You look like blue Elmo.”

“Huh?”

Ryan wags his head at Steven. “You….he just talked about men walking off--”

“Yeah, sorry,” Steven says, not sounding very sorry. 

“--and being the _human embodiment of skeletons_ ,” Ryan continues severely. 

“Yeah, sorry,” Steven repeats, and then he makes it infinitely worse by saying, “You’re blue Grover.”

Dude, chill! Ryan flails his puppet limbs. “I guess solely from Monsters’ Inc--”

“No, Grover is blue Grover, you idiot!” The Professor snarls.

Steven leans dangerously forward in his throne. “You know this guy, Mr. Madej? You look like a blue version of him.”

“No,” The Professor snaps. “I don’t! You know, nobody goes up to Kermit and says, ‘Hey, how’s Jim?’”

This is getting into territory that Ryan had never really considered before. How much of The Professor is Mr. Madej? He assumes that The Professor is primarily Madej, but he has a theory in development that Madej’s control is split over all of the puppets, meaning that he doesn’t fully inhabit any one character.

“So you’re familiar with the concept of a puppet as a puppet?” Ryan asks curiously.

“I...I....”

“Are you sentient?” Ryan probes. Does Mr. Madej know what he does with these lessons? 

“That’s very self-aware,” Steven announces.

The Professor, brimming with building rage, barrels on with his lesson. “Dropping yersinia pestis into an urban setting was like dropping a match into a swimming pool full of gasoline! There were three distinct forms of the plague that ravaged the land: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic.” The sun is again overcome with a case of the reds that imbues the puppet landscape with the threat of danger. “Which would you rather have? A, septicemic plague; B, pneumonic plague; or C, bubonic plague?”

“I do not know what these are,” Steven says.

Ryan knows what they are. They are comeuppance for getting the lesson off-track. 

“Ryan, what’d’ya put?”

“I put B because--”

“Oh, no,” Steven groans.

“--septic is bu...poo, like a septic tank. Bubonic, obviously bad.” Ryan nods at The Professor. “You said pneumonic?

“Pneumonic,” The Professor confirms.

Ryan shrugs his fuzzy green shoulders. “Makes me think of pneumatic.”

“Ohhhh,” The Professor breathes. “Like in a bank.”

“Yeah, so...and when you put a little important file or doc--”

“Yeah, yeah--”

“--in a little tube, it’s…” Ryan attempts to replicate the sound, and he’s pretty pleased with the result.

“No,” The Professor says, “It’s not dhoonk, it’s more of a _thoonk_.”

Ryan tilts his head back at the challenge, his jaws flopping with the movement. “No, I think it’s like a _dhoonk_.”

“It’s more of a _thoonk_.”

“ _Dhoonk_.”

“ _Thoonk_.”

“ _Dhoonk_.”

“ _Thoonk_.” The Professor quickly follows up with, “Steve, what did you put?” but Ryan can’t let it go.

“ _Dhoonk_ ,” he insists.

“Isn’t pneum related to the, uh, lungs?” Steven asks. 

“Yes.”

Crap. Crap, crap, crap!

“Breathing?” Steven clarifies obnoxiously. Like, yeah, Steven, Ryan gets it; he fucked up! “So I thought, you know, I wanna breathe.”

“Sure,” The Professor says magnanimously. 

“So,” Steven charges on, “I chose A. Septicemic.”

“Well, let’s learn about them and see if you made the right choice.” The curtain reappears and envelops his body, and with The Professor’s alarmed,” Waaah!” disappears out of sight. Ryan and Steven, yet again, topple from their thrones to land in the street. 

“I got too obsessed with the _dhoonk_ sound,” Ryan says miserably. The door right behind him slams open, and he jerks forward as a gasping man emerges in a cloud of revolting odor. “Oh, hello.”

“I don’t feel well, and that’s because I have…” the man gasps “...classic bubonic plague. After being bit by a flea, I developed black egg-shaped swellings on my neck and under my arms. These are called buboes.”

Ryan surfaces from his melancholy about mostly likely missing a question. “What? Bu--what? Sorry? Say that again? They’re called buboes?”

“Bubolls?” Steven offers.

“They’re called buboes,” the man says firmly, annoyance coloring his voice. “A funny name for the source of my greatest dread. In a short while, more splotches will riddle my body. I will literally reek of death and there’s a 60% chance I’m a goner.”

Ryan tries really hard not to giggle, but he’s not particularly effective. “Guy’s got the buboes.”

“This sucks,” the man says shorts, turning his sour, splotchy face towards Ryan.. 

“Sense of humor when I’m dying,” Steven comments. Ryan’s not sure if Steven intended to expound on that thought, but he doesn’t get a chance because the door directly in front of them bursts open to reveal a warbling man, mouth and throat thoroughly coated in blood.

“Hey.”

“Oh, shit!” Ryan breathes, trying to scramble to somewhere that isn’t directly between two likely-infectious, definitely-dying puppets.

“Oh,” Steven echoes. 

“I don’t feel well either,” the second man croaks.

“You don’t look well,” Ryan says honestly. 

Steven, for God knows what reason, says, “You have the same voice as guy one!” Actually, Ryan thinks he might know. He’s trying to grasp this world he’s in, he’s looking for proof that Mr. Madej has the situation under control. 

Mr. Madej is no more. It’s just The Professor now.

“That’s because I have pneumonic plague,” the man tells them, completely ignoring Steven, which is fine, because Ryan totally is too.

It is, however, really problematic that Ryan’s guy (B: pneumonic plague) looks like congealed death. “Uh-oh.”

“Which is what happens,” the man explains, “when the plague bacteria travels to the lungs.” He hacks up some more blood. It dribbles off his chin and drips onto his chest.

“Team B,” Ryan says weakly.

“Just my luck, I guess,” the man says. “Heh, heh. Anyway, there’s a 95% chance I’ll die.”

95? No, no, no...there’s no way Ryan got this point.

“Oh, you down, Ryan!” Steven crows. 

Ryan kinda hates him at the moment. “But no buboes on your neck?” He asks the second man.

“But not before I start coughing up blood and spending three days ceaselessly vomiting,” the man wails.

“But all this,” Ryan gestures at his own neck and chest with a flopping green hand, “clear of buboes?”

“This sucks,” the man huffs.

“Come on, septo!” Steven cheers. “Under 60!”

The door directly behind Steven bursts open and a blindfolded man stumbles onto the street.

“I don’t feel well either. And that’s because I have septicemic plague, the rarest but worst form! That means the plague has entered directly into my bloodstream.”

Relief settles over Ryan like a warm bath, soothing away his fear. There’s no way Steven can catch up with him at this rate. He’s got the competition in the bag. “You’ll get ‘em next time, pal.”

“If that sounds bad, that’s because it really is. I have a 100% chance of dying.”

“No way!” Steven protests. “There’s always a chance of living, come on!”

“And,” the man presses on grimly, “by the time I realize I’m even sick, I’ll only have about fourteen and half hours left on this mortal coil. Good thing I’ve got a short bucket list. A fun treat for me is that my extremities will turn black and harden.” 

“Wait,” Ryan says. He’s feeling all sorts of disappointed. “There’s nothing to do with pooping? You don’t poop yourself to death?”

“Nooo,” the man says pitifully.

“If you’re all dead,” Steven harrumphs, “why are you still standing?” Jesus, what a sore loser.

“Okay,” Ryan starts placatingly, but then Steven loses all good will.

“Nobody gets points.”

“I mean, I have a five percent chance of living.” 

“I--” Steven stutters. “I have--”

“Zero percent chance,” Ryan says pointedly.

“I have a chance!”

Their argument is interrupted by the red curtain flashing into existence to deposit The Professor on the street. He lands a fraction of an inch away from the two-dimensional first man.

“Oh, Jesus,” Ryan exhales. “You almost killed the first guy, and your glasses fell off.”

The Professor lets out a heartfelt, “Fuck!” and the curtain twists back into existence to whisk away the men while the thrones scoop Ryan and Steven back up. “I forgot these guys.”

Caught off-guard, Ryan nearly tumbles over the side of the throne. He goes to grip the armrests, but it’s infuriatingly impossible to do so with his little nub hands. He ends up clutching with his soft fuzzy arms, pedaling his useless legs to try and get a better hold.

“Alright,” The Professor says, reappearing in the swoosh of a curtain atop his balcony. “How are you guys doing? You hanging in there?”

Ryan, who is quite literally hanging on to his chair for dear life, couldn’t be less bothered about his situation. Still scrambling to get properly back in his seat, he says, “We’re good. Who gets the points?”

“We’re gonna give that point to Ryan because, uh, he only had a 95% chance of dying, whereas Steven is a goner.”

“I don’t want that trophy anyway!” Steven flails his arms in an attempt, Ryan presumes, to cross them. “I want his satchel.”

“You don’t even know what’s in my satchel,” The Professor says. There’s something off about his voice, a quiet timber indicative of something sinister waiting out of sight.

“I kinda don’t want to know,” Ryan says as he finally clambers back onto his seat, but Steven, bereft of history points, has gone full-on contrarian.

“I want to know.”

“Oh, you want to know,” The Professor croons. “Go on. Open it up.”

“No,” Ryan says firmly. “I’m not going to open up--”

“Open up my satchel.” 

“I’m opening the satchel!” Steven pauses at the edge of his throne. “Can I open it?”

“Yeah.” The red curtain undulates back into existence, unfurling with a snap to form a bridge from Steven’s feet to the balcony.

“Really?” Steven steps tentatively onto the curtain. It holds under his weight, but the disjointed movements of his steps cause Steven to teeter wildly.

“Yeah.”

“There’s not gonna be anything in there,” Ryan says. Every green hair on his body is standing at attention, sensing something foul at hand.

Steven nudges open The Professor’s satchel. “Oh my gosh.”

“Wait.” Ryan crawls over Steven’s throne to get to the curtain bridge. “Is there actually something in there?” He’s been in so many of these grotesque lessons, and never once had it come up that The Professor has goodies.

“Wow!” Steven crows, and Ryan watches his hand emerge with a little speckled bean.

“Wait, is there jelly beans in there?” Ryan picks up speed as he crosses the curtain.

“No, no,” Steven protests, tossing his lanky body in Ryan’s way. “You can’t look. You can’t look!”

“No, wait, if there’s jelly beans in there, I want a jelly bean.” It would be beyond unfair for Ryan not to get a jelly bean. He’s done more Puppet Histories than anyone.

“Yeah,” The Professor coaxes. “Go on.”

Ryan shoves past Steven, brushes open The Professor’s satchel, and stares at the jelly beans in awe. He’s still in disbelief that this whole time, The Professor had a secret stash of candy. Steven cackles at his reaction.

“It is jelly beans,” Ryan breathes. “Look at that!”

“It’s actually jelly beans,” Steven confirms, still half laughing. “Are you gonna eat that? You don’t know where it’s been. That could be puppet poop.”

Ryan pauses, jelly bean resting on a furry nub, before shrugging and toasting the sky. “Don’t matter. I’ll die for a jelly bean, baby. It’s delicious.”

“Do puppets poop jelly beans?” Steven asks The Professor as Ryan tosses back a jelly bean. It never crosses his mind that he can’t actually eat, that he doesn’t have the capability, and consequently, he doesn’t think twice about the jelly bean squishing between the planes of his mouth and dissolving into the plush flat of his bottom jaw.

“You know what?” Ryan flaps his trap at The Professor as he backs away, back to his throne. “You’re okay in my book, Professor.”

“Thank you,” The Professor says. He looks pleased, almost fond. 

“You’re okay,” Ryan repeats, dragging his body over Steven and his throne so he can clamber back into his own. He feels good. He feels really, really good. He feels animated.

“Needless to say, those were all pretty gruesome ways to go, and it was happening everywhere. The records are shoddy. Most historians put the average mortality rate around 30-40%, and in highly populated areas it could have been as high as 50-60%. AH!” 

The sun once again flashes red, and Steven audibly gasps. Ryan gets it. It takes some getting used to.

“This is not a question, but a challenge. In the folders next to you, there are tiny envelopes. And in each of those tiny envelopes is your fate. One of the three of us will not make it. Now I already opened mine, and I live. So…”

“Oh man,” Steven says, pulling his out. He’s quickly picking up how to manipulate objects with no fingers and no grip strength.

Ryan confidently picks up his envelope. Steven hasn’t fared well so far, and he’s feeling untouchable. “Oooh, I do like this tiny little letter. That’s kinda fun.”

Steven lulls his head back to look at Ryan. “Do you want to swap envelopes?”

Ryan clutches his envelope to his torso with his little fuzzy limbs. “No.”

“Oh,” The Professor says cheerily, as though they are not currently discussing their potential demise. “Like the Old Monty Hall?”

“You sure?” Steven needles. 

“Do you think it’s worth it?”

“I think I’m good,” Ryan says carefully. “I’m just going to keep my envelope.”

“ _En_ velope?” Steven corrects. 

“In? En?” The Professor ponders.

“Envelope. _En_ velope?” Ryan would recognize both, but one clearly sounds better. “I think envelope.”

“ _Enveloppe_ ,” The Professor says in an overblown French accent. Steven manages to get his letter open first; probably, Ryan thinks unsportingly, because felt has better grip than faux fur.

“What?!” 

Ryan catches a glimpse of his own letter half a second later and is radiant with smugness. “Hey, look, it says I remain alive!”

“Well, no,” Steven says, and Ryan is ready for Steven to attempt to argue his way out of this, but then Steven actually reads his card. “Congratulations, you have died. Plus one history point.”

“Ohhhh,” The Professor muses. “Let’s just bask in this for a moment and try to feel the weight of the world without Steven Lim.”

A cloud passes before a sun, casting a shadow directly over Steven. Ryan hears Steven’s voice, as clear as day, rumbling through the streets of the little puppet city. “He’s not real. It’s a puppet.” Steven twitches, looking around in blatant confusion. 

Then comes The Professor’s voice. “Yes, I am.”

“No,” Steven’s voice says more insistently, only it’s not Steven, is it, because Steven is sitting right next to him, purple and...are those splotches? “You’re not real.”

“Yes, I am.”

Ryan shifts uncomfortably. He has no clue what the hell is going on. 

“Well,” The Professor says, and the sky instantly clears. With the parting of the clouds, the dark splotches spreading over Steven’s felt body disappear as well. “He was a good guy. And, uh, I dunno what else to say about him, really.”

“Wow,” Steven says indignantly.

“Back to the plague!” The Professor says cheerily. In his enthusiasm, his glasses slip from his nose and slowly but surely begin an unrelenting trajectory down to his mouth. “The most hilarious part about this whole thing to me is that everybody who was supposed to have answers for this stuff-- doctors, church leaders-- they had no idea. Some renowned blowhard in Paris said it was caused by a strange alignment of the planets.”

“Can you say that sentence again?” Ryan asks innocently. “I got distracted.”

The Professor goes still. “Why?”

“Ah, no reason,” Steven says airily. He’s still definitely offended by his shit eulogy. The Professor fumbles to push his glasses back up his face. 

“Well, God-fearing folk just chalked the thing up to divine wrath. Most of them probably thought it was the genuine end of days. There was a weird response to that in the form of the flagellants--”

Ryan’s mouth drops open in delight.

“--a group of people who toured from town to town, whipped themselves to a bloody pulp as the local townsfolk cheered them on, then writhed on the ground as locals dipped their handkerchiefs in fresh puddles of blood.”

Okay, well, definitely not what Ryan was anticipating, but ok.

“They called themselves ‘the flatulence’?” Steven clarifies. 

For a moment, The Professor is very still. Then his mouth cracks open and he wheezes, “NOoooo haha.”

Steven looks to Ryan. “What did he say?”

“That’s what is sounded like.”

“No, no, no.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Steven says with the unapologetic voice of one who seeks the truth. “Did they go around town farting?”

“The flagellants,” The Professor enunciates, still laughing. 

“Ohh,” Ryan and Steven chorus. 

“Like fla...fla…”

“No,” Steven says. “We get it.”

“Flage? Flagellating?” The Professor heaves his body in a shrug-like motion. “And as for doctors, they actually tried their best, but they also fell short. A lot of them blamed, quote, ‘infected air’, which is sorta close, but they prescribed things like bloodletting and opening northern-facing windows.” The sun is again enveloped in red, and The Professor shrieks in apparent surprise. Steven gasps. “Which of these other strange things was prescribed by doctors? A, huffing toilets; B, wine enemas; or C, snorting ground-up wasp wings.”

“I’m already locked in, baby,” Ryan cheers as he manhandles his marker-quill.

“I’m locked in,” Steven retorts, scrambling to write something on his board.

“I’m gonna go with B, wine enemas, because I could see maybe how they would think that would flush the system.”

“Okay,” The Professor says noncommittally. “And Steven?”

“I went with C.”

“C,” The Professor repeats. “Snorting the--”

“--the wasps,” Steven confirms.

“--ground-up wasp wings,” The Professor muses. The thrones tilt forward slowly, simultaneously giving them a solid view through a window of a man cleaning a toilet and threatening to dump them on the street. “Well, one physician noticed that latrine cleaners seemed less vulnerable, which resulted in scores of people huffing actual human fecal fumes.” The man takes a deep breath in.

“No way.” Steven shakes his head. “No way.”

The thrones lurch back upright, slamming Ryan and Steven into the back. They fall, slightly dazed, back onto the seat cushions.

“So point to nobody. As you can imagine, once the death toll started to rise, things got real grim: businesses closed up shop, people left town, carts made daily rounds to collect the previous night’s deceased. It wasn’t long before bodies were piling up. At night, dogs and pigs would feast on the shallowly buried bodies.” The sky darkens for an instant, like lightning, except the total opposite. The sun returns yellow and blinding, and Ryan can hear it: he can hear the wet, gnawing sounds of corpses being eaten. He refuses to look down. “With the graveyards filled, in some areas, they dug mass burial pits. Elsewhere, they dropped hundreds of corpses into a nearby river to take them to uh, well... who the hell cares?”

Ryan snorts. “Yeah. As you would.”

“Somewhere else,” The Professor decides. “In this kind of atmosphere, you can understand how people might just totally throw in the towel. In the novel The Plague, the narrator exemplifies this emotional exhaustion, quote, ‘None of us was capable of exalted emotion and had...and all had..sorry...in his novel...huh…” The Professor is visibly befuddled.

“Gather yourself, Professor,” Ryan says. 

“It’s so toasty,” The Professor explains, shifting uncomfortably. He tosses his head back to examine the apartment behind him before he clears his throat and tries again. “‘None of us was capable of exalted emotion; all had trite, monotonous feelings. ‘It’s high time it stopped, people would say.””

“As you’d say when all your family members are dying,” Ryan agrees with a poorly suppressed laugh.

“It’s high time this stopped,” The Professor repeats.

“High time this would stop.”

“I’m gonna start using that,” The Professor says, and Ryan laughs for real this time. “Me, the puppet.” 

If Ryan weren’t already halfway through saying “It’s high time this would stop” again, he might have unpacked that statement and had a follow-up question. Instead, he goes, “But they said it in a British accent though, right?”

“I mean, it was all over Europe, so--”

“It’s high time this would stop,” Ryan says with his best fish-and-chips voice.

The Professor seems delighted and starts in with his own accent. “It’s high time it...is that German?” He chortles at himself. “I don’t know what that was!”

Steven looks seven levels past done. Ryan is impressed that he’s able to telegraph his annoyance so clearly through the static features of his puppet body.

“Well, the constant looming specter of death also seeped into art. If you’ll look in your folders at the supplementary materials--take them one at a time here-- you’ll find some art from someone who lived through the trauma of the plague, Hans Holbein the Younger. And it features the Danse Macabre imagery that arose around the time.”

Ryan manages to get his folder out before Steven and is feeling pretty smug about it until he sees the contents.

“Oh,” Ryan says.

"There’s a child. Oh, no.”

The Professor roars like a made-for-tv children’s villain. But instead of unsettling, it rings like a suggestion in Ryan’s stuffed mind.

“Oh, God, that’s great stuff,” Ryan says over Steven. “No, that is pretty good stuff. I do appreciate that.”

“Oh, that was dark,” Steven says adamantly. 

“Nooooo,” The Professor cries in a simpering falsetto. “Don’t take our baby!”

“The funniest thing,” Ryan chuckles, “the funniest thing about it is the nice little nightcap that he has on.”

“Yeah,” The Professor agrees, mirth still ringing in every syllable.

“Hey,” Steven says mildly, “but that kid’s, uh, shirt’s pretty fashionable.”

“Yeah,” Ryan quips. “It’s the Kanye collection.”

That gets a giggle out of Steven. “Really...heh heh heh...it really is.”

“Well,” The Professor barrels on, “in what must have seemed like a miracle, the plague would largely run its course by 1351. Luckily, the rats carrying the plague were not actually native to western Europe, so once the disease burned through the population, it could no longer sustain itself. Four years of constant gripping terror, and for what? Well, I’ll tell you what. There were some baller upsides to this whole thing that nobody ever talks about. So let’s count our blessings.” The Professor beckons to the sky as the sun floods the street in scarlet light. “Which of these was an unexpected upside of the plague? A, It killed a very bad pope; B, It raised minimum wage; C, People made sheds out of bones.”

Steven perks up. “Raised the minimum wage? Supply...demands...let’s see that economic curve.”

“This is what Jeff Chang has in mind, right?” Ryan snarks.

“This is like a very depressing Shark Tank,” The Professor says. Ryan gets the impression that he’s not a fan of Steven broadcasting the correct answer, but hey, Ryan’s not gonna complain. Not at all!

“I go B,” Steven announces. 

“I’m gonna go B as well.” Ryan’s not stupid, after all.

“Couple of B’s,” The Professor says genially. “My B-boys again.”

The streets reverberate. “ **_B-Boys_ **!”

“Yeah,” Ryan says. “We go riding hard.”

“Points for both of you,” The Professor announces. “The job market was boomin’. So landlords tended to employ numerous workers, and since the workforce was, in some places, almost halved, they were desperate to hire whoever they could, which allowed workers to up their asking price.”

“Simple economics,” Steven scoffs.

“And while this would eventually level out a bit, it still permanently tipped the skills for the working class and granted them both bargaining power and a previously unseen confidence. So despite this silver lining, there’s no getting around the fact that the plague was one of, if not the most, devastating blows issued to humanity. To better illustrate that, one last shot at history points.” The sky turns red. “If the plague happened today and took an equivalent toll on the population, how many people would die?”

“Oh!” Steven cheers expectantly.

“A, nearly 956 million; B, nearly 1.9 billion, or C, nearly 7.53 billion.”

Ryan sighs. Numbers are, and have always been, kinda abstract past like, a hundred. “I actually don’t know how many people there are on the planet.”

“Really?” Steven crows.

“I really don’t, yeah,” Ryan says. 

“That’s a number you should probably get to know,” Steven informs him. He looks up winningly to The Professor. “Is this double points here?”

“Uh,” The Professor deliberates, “Yeah. You know what, yeah.”

“What the hell?” Ryan pauses mid-writing. “You can’t just make that up on the spot.”

Ryan’s words, if anything, seem to bolster The Professor. “Yeah, I did. It’s double points.”

“Ay!” Steven cheers.

“Ryan, what did you put?”

Ryan begrudgingly flips his board around. “I put C.”

“You put C,” The Professor says. His tone is balanced on a knife’s edge between condescending and supportive.

Steven’s tone is less ambivalent. “You are so wrong!”

“That’s right,” Ryan retorts.

“And Steven, what did you put?”

“I put B because there are about 7 billion people on this earth, and a third of them would be around 2 billion.”

Okay, yeah, well, literally no one asked Steven to show them his work. God, Ryan really hates him.

“That’s exactly right,” The Professor says. “1.9 billion is the estimated figure. Grim! The final history point goes to Steven. This concludes our history lesson. I’m going to go tally up the scores to see who receives the coveted cup and the title of History Master. While I do that, please enjoy this special performance from, uh...let’s see, who do we have this week? Uh, ah yes...Death!”

Ryan and Steven break out in nervous laughter as they’re tipped yet again onto the street. They land in a heap and are just scrambling upright--it’s really hard to get up without bones, okay?--when two orbs drop down from The Professor’s balcony.

Shit, bones, and innards rise up from the gutter, twisting around the orbs and darkening to form a black cloak framing a huge skeleton with bulging eyes.

“You know,” Death says conversationally, “during the funny little plague, I worked some loooooooooooooong hours, and at the end of most days, my dogs were barking.” He takes a giant step forward, causing the cobblestones to bounce. Ryan and Steven automatically move backwards. “But you know what they say: if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Steven tugs on a door handle, the same one that had earlier opened for the man with septicemic plague, but the door opens to a wall. Death steps closer, leering demonically.

_Tell you what, I think it sure is fun_

_to make people die._

The streets cheerfully echo back, “Make people die!”

_You should see how friggin’ funny ya look_

_When the lights go outta your eyes._

The sun blinks out of existence, and for a terrible, terrible moment, the only thing illuminating the streets are Death’s glowing eyes. Ryan breaks into a hobbling run down the street, Steven close behind. The sun merrily returns a moment later.

_(When the lights go out of your eyes)_

_And man I miss that ol’ Bubonic plague_

_What a treat,_

_What a hoot,_

_What a gas!_

_Seein’ pig eat bodies in the street,_

_TBH, it kinda kicked ass_

_(It’s cool as hell)_

_And sure I worked my fingers to the bone_

“This is intolerable,” Ryan huffs.

“This is amazing!” Steven contradicts. Ryan almost forgets his terror in the face of his disbelief. Does he still not get it? Yeah, Ryan can get being amazed by the novelty at the beginning, but surely, but now, Steven has to know..

_Bodies here, bodies there,_

_bodies everywhere!_

_Lumpy people droppin’ left and right,_

_the putrid smell of rotting flesh_

_in the air._

_Ah, but all good things come to an end._

_And to be honest? I needed a rest._

_But I’ll never forget_

_how great it felt_

_to cash that overtime check!_

The throne taking out their knees has never been such a relief as it is now. Steven scrambles to give a standing ovation on top of his throne as it raises up and Death disappears in a swaddle of red curtain.

“Alright, sure, why not,” Ryan says, and he claps unenthusiastically as well.

“Come on, that was--”

“I don’t know if that was standing-o worthy.”

“That was quite stand-worthy.”

“I don’t know if that was standing-o worthy,” Ryan insists. 

“I want that guy to narrate next time,” Steven exclaims. He seems really taken by Death’s energy and insufficiently alarmed about, uh, Ryan doesn’t know..THE FACT THAT IT WAS DEATH.

“What?” The Professor says, appearing in a swirl of red curtain. “What’d’you say, Steven?”

“Uh, nothing. Nothing about you. I...you...you’re doing a good job with the curtain.”

“Thank you,” The Professor says with a touch of suspicion. 

“Well done!” Steven says. He always oversells this stuff, so of course, Ryan has to interject.

“When you were backstage, he said you sucked.”

“No, no, no,” Steven protests, glaring at Ryan. “I do love the man who decides my fate with the trophy.”

“Unbelievable,” The Professor growls.

Delightedly, Ryan piles on. “He said you stunk big time, and then he made a fart noise!”

“Well,” The Professor says, clearly not interested in entertaining this conversational strand any longer. “Let’s give it up for that wonderful performance. What a guy.”

As an avid fan of scary movies, he does have a little appreciation for Death’s performance.

“What a guy!” The Professor beams. “Uh, and now, for the total scores, it appears that Steven Lim--”

Ryan feels every gutted, hollow inch of his insides.

“That’s right!”

“--is our History Master with 5 history points.”

“5 points, baby!” Steven cheers.

Ryan is floored by the injustice of it. There’s no way. He won, fair and square. He deserves that cup, he deserves to leave this torture system masquerading as a innovative teaching method. “Bogus!” Ryan roars.

“Cause I died!” Steven taunts.

“Steven, come collect The Coveted History Cup.”

The red curtain unfurls, connecting Steven’s throne to The Professor’s balcony. 

“Fixed,” Ryan insists.

“You are the History Master,” The Professor announces as Steven parades across the curtain.

“I’m gonna walk by you slowly so that you can see who won.”

“You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve that,” Ryan yells. “You don’t deserve that!”

"Oh my God!” Steven crows. “And I have a bottle of jelly beans inside the trophy.”

Ryan glowers.

“Again,” The Professor says, “that is my poop.”

Ryan’s glower intensifies. “I don’t think he ever mentioned that before.”

“Well, thank you for watching Puppet History,” The Professor says. Ryan turns to watch the puppet world crumble and disintegrate into the classroom. “We will see you next time. Thank you to Steven again for joining us.”

“No thank you to me?” Ryan demands. He doesn’t remember a single time The Professor has acknowledged the psychological toll these lessons take on him. When The Professor opens his mouth to respond, Steven hits him with a jelly bean.

“What just happened?” The Professor demands. 

“Hey, open your mouth,” Steven says. “I got you.”

The Professor warily opens his mouth, and Steven tosses a jelly bean that skedaddles behind the desk. 

“That was not even--”

“That was a lot worse,” Steven acknowledges.

"Not even a little bit.”

“One more, one more, one more,” Steven begs.

“Alright,” The Professor sighs.

“You’re just gonna waste jelly beans!” Ryan grumps. Another jelly bean hits the floor and skitters across the tiles.

“I’ll see you later, guys,” The Professor says, and the red curtain unfurls to wrap around his body.

“You didn’t thank me, Professor,” Ryan reminds him.

“Bye-bye,” The Professor says cheerily. “Bye, Ryan.”

“You didn’t thank me!” Ryan insists. 

Madej winks at him, carefully wrapping The Professor back up in the red curtain. 

Ryan sneezes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 95% of this is straight-up a transcript of "Life During the Time of the Black Plague Pandemic" 🤦
> 
> Give me that feedback on what worked and what didn't so I can juice up lesson 2. There's a teeny bitty plot connecting the episodes, but more of that later!


	3. Stealing the World's Most Expensive Necklace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second episode of Puppet History, only there's a serial plot.

Ryan’s belongings scatter across the floor as he stares numbly at the agenda listed on the white board. 

“Ryan?” Jenny asks concernedly, picking up the pencil that had rolled over to her. “You okay?”

“Okay?” Ryan repeats hysterically. “Okay?!”

“So that’s a no,” Jenny says. “You need the nurse?”

“I...I need…” Ryan takes a deep breath. “I need to talk to Mr. Madej.”

He thought they were past this. He thought the last one was the _last_ one, especially with Steven…. _Steven_....

Ryan bursts back into the hallway, where Madej is shooing the last of the students into their respective classrooms.

“Ryan,” Madej says warmly. He takes in Ryan’s expression and morphs into concerned teacher mode. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re doing another Puppet History.”

“Oh,” Madej laughs. “Right.”

“After what happened to Steven!”

“After what happened to..?” Madej peers at Ryan. “What exactly are you saying, Ryan?”

“The flea vomited into Steven’s mouth, and he picked the 100% mortality plague, and he had the death envelope. I don’t know which one it was, or maybe it was the combination of the three that...that...”

For a moment, Mr. Madej just stares at Ryan with a blank face and raised eyebrows. “You don’t mean to tell me that you believe Steven’s…” Madej pauses delicately to find the right word. “...condition was related to the Black Death lesson, do you?”

“What?!” Ryan yelps. “How could you _not_ think that?”

Madej looks torn between complete disbelief and utter condescension. When he speaks, he sounds so patronizing that Ryan wants to scream. “It’s a coincidence. Unfortunate, yes, but nonetheless a coincidence. Life is full of--”

“It’s not!” Ryan retorts, and he tacks on a belated “sir” in case shouting at a teacher is out of line. Madej doesn’t look too bothered though. He’s not so big on formalities. “It’s not a coincidence.” 

“I understand this is a sensitive topic because of Steven,” Madej says calmly. “Were you two close?”

“That’s not...it doesn’t matter!” Ryan huffs. Exasperation crawls under his skin and leaks through his sinuses, setting him ablaze. “Puppet History is dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Madej snorts. 

“Yes!” Ryan shrieks. 

Madej obligingly stops laughing at Ryan’s anguish. “I’ll tell you what. In light of your concern, we won’t have anyone else die in-show today. How’s that?”

“That’s your compromise?” Ryan can’t fully conceal his scorn. “What sort of teacher knowingly drags students into danger?”

“Are you actually scared of Puppet History?” Madej demands. See, this is why Ryan can’t get a good read of the link between The Professor and Madej. Right now, Mr. Madej is pretty convincingly acting like he has no clue what goes on during his lessons, like he doesn’t know what happens once Puppet History starts. 

“Yes!”

“Oh.” Madej looks surprised and a bit...disappointed? Ryan’s not quite sure. 

“It’s scary,” Ryan mutters defiantly. 

“It’s puppets!” Madej exclaims. “Half of which are made of _posterboard_.”

“It’s not just puppets.” 

“Then what is it?” Madej asks. 

Ryan flounders for an answer that won’t make him sound like a lunatic. “I just don’t want to participate in the lesson, Mr. Madej.”

Madej gives Ryan a hard, searching look. “I don’t make the rules.”

“But you do though--”

“As soon as you win one of these, you’re done.”

“I never win.”

“Certainly not with that attitude.”

Before Ryan can even begin to think of a response, their conversation is promptly and thoroughly interrupted by Kate popping out of Mr. Fulmer’s class. “Hey, Mr. Madej! And I was looking for you too! Oh, wait, is this a bad time? I can wait. Oh, but actually, I can’t.” She steps all the way out of Fulmer’s class. “They’re going over a test I missed and haven’t made up yet. Mr. Fulmer wanted to know if I could sit in your class until they’re done.”

“Go ahead, Kate,” Madej says. 

“Cool, thanks!” Kate says merrily, prancing into Madej’s classroom.

“It’s past time for class to begin,” Madej says, turning back to Ryan. “Today’s lesson is a cautionary tale with a humorous twist. Nowhere near the body count of the bubonic plague. If at any time you are uncomfortable, let me know. I’ll have you run a delivery to Ms. Perez and the lesson will be wrapped up by the time you return.” He looks at Ryan for an answer. “Deal?”

Ryan really doesn’t want to go in. But what’s he going to do, argue with a teacher? “You got more of those jelly beans?” he asks.

Madej nods crisply. “Plenty more where those came from.”

“Okay,” Ryan says softly.

“Okay?” 

“Okay,” Ryan says, a little bit louder.

“Super!” Madej says, and he leads the way into the classroom. As soon as he enters class, his posture opens to something more theatrical and he calls out in a booming voice, “Welcome one and all to Puppet History. Today we will be taking an ever-winding look at yet another chapter in the heavy, heavy book we call history while our guests ruthlessly compete for the coveted title of History Master. Pop on those question caps and….let’s crack in!”

Jenny gives Ryan an encouraging thumbs up as he heads back to his seat, but he doesn’t even have time to sit down before Madej says, “Ryan, retrieve The Professor.”

Ryan pauses long enough to square his shoulders before setting course to the bookcase where The Professor rest, ensconced in layers of crushed red velvet. How did he end up agreeing to this? But actually, how in the hell did he end up agreeing?!

“Ryan,” Madej continues, “who would you like to challenge today?”

Ryan sizes up the class, but he already knows who he’s going to pick. Someone who has never particularly excelled in history class. Someone who isn’t even in a history class this semester. “Kate. I’m picking Kate.”

Kate looks around in equal parts excitement and bewilderment. “What? Yes? What?”

Madej locks eyes with Ryan as Ryan brings The Professor to the front of the classroom. He looks like he’s considering whether or not to say something. Ryan reckons his motivation for picking Kate is pretty guessable. Ryan drops his gaze as he gets closer and sort of shoves The Professor onto Madej’s podium. 

“Contestants, take your seats!” Madej says.

Kate practically runs up to sit in one of the throne chairs. She’s vibrating in anticipatory excitement. Ryan pushes his feet into the ground as he lowers himself onto his throne as slowly as possible.

“I’m--” Madej says, unraveling the curtain and bringing The Professor to life-- “obviously your beloved host, The Professor.” 

Kate claps. “Yay, Professor!”

“Thank you, thank you!” Madej says. “Ryan Bergara, are you ready?”

Ryan swallows hard before very intentionally turning to face Mr. Madej. He’s not running. He’s not hiding. He’s done delaying the inevitable. Ryan locks eyes with The Professor. "Yeah.”

“Special guest Kate Peterman,” The Professor chirps. “Are you ready?”

“I am so ready!” Kate enthuses. 

“Would you guys like to know what you’re playing for?”

“Yeah,” Kate says. “Oh, yeah.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It’s the coveted cup of the History Master,” The Professor says. The cup elevates, twinkling, next to The Professor, and Ryan turns to Kate.

“Same prize as last time,” Ryan informs Kate.

“Well I’m excited,” Kate replies firmly. She doesn’t seem to have noticed that she’s a puppet yet. She’s just staring, enthralled, at The Professor.

“Well let’s get to it. Today’s tale is a downright caper. It started out as a simple con and turned into a scandal that would captivate all of France and forever alter the course of history. And also be adapted into a movie starring Hillary Swank that I’ve never seen because they don’t let puppets into movie theaters!” 

“Oh my god,” Ryan scoffs. Kate nods seriously. She looks half a breath away from coordinating a march for puppet rights.

“Unrelated question,” The Professor continues. “Have you guys ever been catfished?”

“Yeah,” Kate says. “Uh...I thought so, but...I was just fully rejected.” Ryan doesn’t know where to look. He just sits, sympathetically hunched, on his throne. “Is it hot in here?”

“Yeah,” The Professor says, but it’s the sort of agreement that says _Okay, stop talking now_ , not actual validation. “Yeah.”

“Oh, it’s too personal,” Kate decides. 

It is too personal. Ryan is a bit clueless as to why The Professor asked in the first place. It’s not a very appropriate question for a teacher to ask a student. He debates calling The Professor out on it, but the puppet is already charging full steam ahead into the lesson.

“The place, France. The time, the 1780's. Before this nutty plot unfolds, we need to lay out three of our key players. First up, Jeanne LaMotte, born Jeanne de-Valois-Saint-Remy.” The desks and back of the classroom are quickly overtaken by ominously rustling shiny plastic shrubberies and, directly behind the thrones, wings of an enormous, gold-gilded building solder through the whiteboard and cinder-block.

“Is her boob out?” Kate asks carefully.

Ryan looks over at the two-dimensional puppet that’s popped up right next to The Professor. Kate seems entirely focused on all the wrong things, more interested in a heaving paper bosom than both the livetime scene change and her own transformation into a creature with shaggy orange fur and plastic eyeballs. “It’s certainly tipping close.”

“She’s uh…” The Professor sputters from his perch on top of his tower of a shrubbery. “Uh...uh…”

“Say it,” Kate says sternly.

“No. No,” The Professor protests. “I was going to say ‘an unmodest woman.’”

“Yeah, whatever,” Ryan says. It’s really not the most important thing at the moment, and he’s honestly still a little boggled by Kate’s tunnel vision on the show. “It’s fine. I’m not judging.”

“I’m not judging,” Kate informs Ryan. When they turn back to The Professor, he’s all up in the doll’s space, thoroughly inspecting her chest.

“There’s no nipple, for the record.”

“No.” Ryan’s brain is having a little meltdown. This is soooo inappropriate. “I...don’t look at it, man!”

Kate cackles. “I just wanna loop this puppet saying ‘nipple.’”

Well, when Kate puts it that way, it is pretty good and funny. Also, Kate’s got girl parts and seems not at all offended, so maybe Ryan’s just overthinking it. “There’s no nipple, and him staring intently at her breast.”

“There’s no nipple,” Kate wheezes.

“I double checked,” Ryan says in a passable impression of The Professor. “I thought..I coulda sw--”

“I don’t see nothing,” The Professor informs the both of them in earnest. “Anyway, she was born in 1756 with a little royalty in her blood as her father was the descendent of an illegitimate son of Henri the 2nd--”

Aha! Ryan sees a window of opportunity to say a naughty word without any danger of getting in trouble, and he’s quick to take it. “A bastard!”

“--a French king from way back in the 1500's.” The Professor gives Ryan a quick glance. “Yes, a bastard.” He is quick to dive back into his spiel. “Despite her royal blood, uh, by the time Jeanne was born, her family was really hurting for that sweet, sweet coin. As a child, her parents made her beg on the street, shouting quote, ‘Gentlemen, or Ladies, take compassion on a poor orphan, descended in a direct line from Henri II, King of France.’”

Wow. Her parents totally suck.

“After a rough childhood and plenty of her own adolescent scheming, she eventually settled down with a military man named Nicholas de La Motte who looks exactly like every other French man in the 1700's. But despite his position and her ongoing claimed royalty, the two were still hard up for cash. We’ll check back in on them in just a bit.”

“What did she do for cash as well?” Ryan interjects. He gives The Professor an innocent smile, which is damn hard to do as a puppet, thank you very much. Kate looks at him and then does a rapid double-take. Jesus, is she only just now realizing that Ryan’s a puppet? She looks ridiculous with her mouth hanging open like that. “Were they dual incoming it?”

“She kinda like, schemed her away around. She eventually--”

“Let’s hear about these schemes.” Getting The Professor off-balance is oddly satisfying. And as a bonus, bothering The Professor feels like a weird tribute to Steven. “I wanna hear more about these schemes.”

“She goes to court and she was like, ‘Yo, my dad was the illegitimate son of that guy--of King Henri II.’ And they were like, ‘You know what? We’re gonna give you some money every month.’ So that’s how she kinda made it, ya know?”

Kate’s mouth spasms shut and she drags her eyes from Ryan to stare at The Professor.

“So she just went up to officials and said, ‘Hey, I know the guy in charge, gimme some cash’ and they were like, chill?” Ryan asks incredulously.

“Basically,” The Professor shrugs. “Yeah, kinda.”

“Why didn’t _everybody_ do that?” Kate demands, but then she pauses and says in a voice ripe with speculation, “Well, you’d get real beheaded.”

“You’re also saying that the very threat of a guillotine was enough to make them think, ‘Why would you chance that?’ Right?”

“Oh, yeah,” The Professor agrees. “I mean, they were using that thing left and right.”

Ryan might not know loads about the French revolution, but he’s got the gist of it. “They were.”

“That blade was _dull_ ,” The Professor says with a slow emphasis. 

Ryan shifts uncomfortably. Madej had said that there wouldn’t be death in this one, and the guillotine talk is getting a little too dark for his liking.

“That blade was dull!” Kate hoots.

The Professor meets Ryan’s eyes and cuts in before Kate has finished laughing. “Onto our second person of interest: Louis de Rohan. Born in 1734 to the distinguished Rohan clan, author Jonathan Beckman describes him as quote, “Impeccably polite with fully, dark eyes that shone under gently drooping eyelids, Louis charmed everyone he met, and accumulated a pantheon of lovers.’” 

Ryan shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He feels thrown off by The Professor's seemingly chivalrous reaction to Ryan’s discomfort about the guillotine and has a mighty need to get The Professor off-balance again. “Kind of sounded a little bit like erotica to me.”

Instead of looking unsettled by the not-at-all-school-appropriate conversational turn, The Professor chuckles heartily. “Yes, I did omit all of the yums.”

“All of the yums,” Ryan repeats helplessly.

“Yum, yum, yummy,” The Professor clarifies. 

“Homina, homina, homina.”

“Yum, yum, yum.”

“Wow, wow, wowza!” Kate chimes in with gusto.

“Woah-woah-woah-woah.” Ryan’s already delighted at the impending sound-off he’s sensing.

“Boi-oi-oi-oi-oing!” Kate uses her little puppet hands to mime bulging eyeballs.

Ryan makes a long sound that starts off like a siren and ends sounding like an old set of windshield wipers.

“Balalalalala buhhhhh!”

“THAT’S ENOUGH!” The Professor roars in a voice that literally shakes the sun.

Kate gasps with laughter, and Ryan, with one wary eye on The Professor, joins in defiantly. “Look...how..mad!”

“He never looks happy,” Ryan cackles. “He either looks indifferent or very disappointed and angry.”

The Professor crosses his arms and gives them that “I’ll wait” face that teachers make constantly. Once Kate and Ryan’s giggles have faded, he goes on. “After some time in the circuit, Rohan landed a pretty cushy gig in 1770 as ambassador to Vienna. And although he thought the position was below his status, he took it anyway. He quickly gained a reputation in Austria for his wild-ass parties, where he really ruffled feathers.”

Ryan is fully ready to call The Professor out on using the word “ass”, but all thoughts of doing so are promptly eradicated by the sun flashing to red, dousing the courtyard in menacing hues. “Uh-oh.”

“Summon your brains! What aspect of Rohan’s social gatherings was so controversial? A, his performance of what he called ‘genital origami’--”

“WHAT?” Kate yelps. Ryan would have had more of a reaction if he weren’t already working at extracting his answer board from the throne’s side pocket. As is, Kate’s surprise is enough surprise for the both of them.

“--B, his risque seeding charts; or C, his collection of monkeys.”

“It’s gotta be A,” Kate says, looking to Ryan for affirmation.

It definitely has to be A. It’s too weird not to be true. Either that or B, but Ryan is definitely not going to be the guy who picks the grossest, most misogynistic answer. Monkeys, though. Those were a thing, right? He’s pretty sure pet monkeys were a thing. “Yeah.”

Kate belatedly sees Ryan pulling his board into his lap and nearly falls out of her throne as she retrieves her own. The Professor watches them with steely eyes until they have both recapped their markets.

“Alright, Ryan, what’d’ya put?”

“I’m gonna go with testicle entanglement.”

“And Kate?”

“Same, I also--”

“You’re also gonna go with A?”

“Yeah,” Kate says, sounding borderline apologetic.

“Well, it’s kind of boring, but--”

Ryan, ever ready to snatch a correct answer from the jaws of--well, of not having the correct answer-- immediately picks plan B, which, in this case, is not actually B. “It’s the monkeys, isn’t it?”

“It’s the seating chart.”

“What?” Ryan shouts. 

The Professor decides not to engage Ryan’s surprise. “So normally--”

“OH,” Ryan realizes, feeling like the worst kind of idiot.

“--in parties--” The Professor continues doggedly.

“Sea **t** ing charts. I thought you said seeding, as in...I had something way grosser in my mind. Well, you followed it after...now I’m explaining myself.”

The Professor gives Ryan a blank look of absolute indifference. “Huh?”

For some reason, this sets Kate off. She promptly starts cackling, trying to stop long enough to repeat, “Huh?”

“I feel like I have to explain myself,” Ryan says.

“What?” The Professor says, sounding like he’s very much not at all interested in Ryan actually answering.

“When you said ‘genital origami’, I figured you were upping the ante, sexually, so I thought you said ‘seeding chart,’ as if he’s drawing a chart out of who he’s going to --”

“WHAT?” Kate bellows.

“Well, that’s insane,” The Professor says disapprovingly.

“What!?” Kate repeats. “WHAT?!”

“I’m sorry!”

“That is absolutely insane.”

“What?!”

“You said ‘genital origami!’” Ryan shouts accusingly.

“Yeah,” The Professor says, like the fact that he had come up with such a fucking weird wrong answer isn’t more problematic than Ryan mishearing the right answer. 

“You thought what?” Kate repeats. She’s being a total broken record right now, and Ryan does not appreciate it. 

“And you said, ‘What would be--’”

“Why would you? Why?”

“What?!?” Kate says for the hundredth time. 

“Repeat the question!” Ryan shouts defensively.

“WHY WOULD YOU?” The Professor demands, but Ryan is done with this. He’s not going to be guilted over picking the wrong answer, the same wrong answer that Kate picked, mind you! He glowers at The Professor, who pauses mid rant, clears his throat, and says in a mild voice completely unrelated to his previous tone, “Well, he had small tables is the answer.” The sun glows a soft white light that gradually overtake the reddish hues. “Uh, normally, at affairs like that, they’d have one big cartoon rich person table, and everybody would kinda be in the order of like, oh rich people down at this end, poor nobodies down at this end.”

Kate hums in understanding.

“But he had a bunch of tiny tables where everyone could mingle. Kinda fun!”

“That’s kinda cool,” Ryan agrees tentatively. 

“Yeah. And everybody hated--like, people got pissed.”

If Ryan could smirk, he would be smirking so hard. It’s just kinda hard to get the facial features to indicate much emotion. “Piss drunk?” he asks snidely.

“No,” The Professor says shortly. “One of the people who was not pleased about this was the local head honcho, Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa, who complained about him to anyone who would listen. Rohan, in return, ragged on Maria behind her back. Eventually, the Empress’ daughter caught wind of this and got pissed, which could pose some problems for Rohan’s political aspirations because her daughter was none other than our third person of interest here today. It’s question time!” The sun flashes scarlet, casting all of the gardens and palace into murky light.

“Oh, again,” Ryan says unenthusiastically. 

“You thought you were safe, but another question pounced,” The Professor crowed. “Just who in the hell was Maria Theresa’s daughter? There is no multiple choice. You must write it down.”

“Guess what my name is,” Ryan mocks, uncapping his marker-quill.

“Yeah,” The Professor says levelly. 

“Pulling out the stops with these questions,” Ryan retorts.

The Professor stares back silently until Ryan, feeling an odd mix of defiance and cowedness, scrawls down the only old-timey French person he knows. 

“Ryan,” The Professor says brusquely the moment Ryan’s marker clears the board. “Answer.”

“I don’t even think this person is from that time,” Ryan prefaces. “Antoinette? Marie Antoinette. How do you spell..? I dunno.”

“Well,” The Professor says, “Kate?”

Kate wriggles forward in her seat. “I just put, and I probably spelled it wrong too, Maria Tereza II.”

“Okay,” The Professor says. 

Kate looks up with trepidation. “What is it?”

“Well, Ryan gets a point because it’s none other than powdered-wig wearing, sheep-perfuming, cake-eating queen herself, Marie Antoinette.”

“Cake-eating queen!” Kate giggles, and then she seems to register that Ryan just pulled in the lead. “Son of a bitch.”

“Those f-”

“I really want that trophy, okay,” Kate announces with all the power of a woman looking to vision board the future into reality.

“Good question, doc,” Ryan tells The Professor.

“Thank you! Now we can spend a lot of time unpacking this lady’s life, but if you don’t know the basics, she was born into Austrian royalty, married off to French royalty at age 14, stepped into queenhood at age 18, and gets a lot of flack because she eventually became a prominent scapegoat during the French revolution despite not really being all that bad of a lady.”

To be honest, thinking about Marie Antoinette puts Ryan’s problems in a different perspective. But also, like, she got literal royal treatment before all the beheading jazz, so maybe Ryan’s not feeling too bad for her after all. 

“Well, now that we have our three players in mind, let’s jump into the Palace of Versailles in the year 1784, when all three parties happened to be present. Worth noting that the Palace of Versailles was a hive of activity that pretty much anyone could walk around, though people were probably quick to sniff out if you weren’t a noble. So Louis de Rohan was now serving on the French court as Grand Almoner, but he was desperate to be Prime Minister and believed that the position was being withheld from him due to Marie Antoinette outright loathing his ass.”

What is it with The Professor and his foul mouth today? Jesus Christ.

“Jeanne, in her ongoing quest to cash in on her royal lineage, had moved near Versailles with her husband to hobnob. Now, Jeanne had recently been acquainted with Rohan and was aware of the queen’s refusal to even speak to him. So, as a person desperate to climb the social ladder, what do you suppose she does with this information when they cross paths at Versailles?” The sun flares crimson. “A, she blackmails him; B, she tells the queen he’s going to assassinate her; orr C, she tells Rohan she’s the queen’s best friend. What to do, what to do?”

“Ohhhhh, boy,” Kate huffs. “When in doubt, pick C.” She nods seriously at Ryan as he scribbles down his answer. “They say that about the SAT.”

“What did you put?” The Professor quickly clarifies by tacking on, “Ryan.”

“Wow. I put B.”

“You put B.”

“I think we know what Kate picked.”

“Kate, you picked C?”

“I did!” Kate announces.

“Well, let’s find out what happens.” The Professor swan dives from his shrubbery into the undulating mass of red velvet curtain.

“What?” Kate gapes.

“Costume change,” Ryan explains. It’s not the most accurate, but it gets the general idea across. He’d elaborate some more, but he’s distracted by the small detail of his throne dumping him down to the paved entrance of Versailles.

“This is the most fun I’ve had in a really long time.”

Ryan looks at Kate with substantial alarm. This girl is crazy.

“Huh!” a two-dimensional puppet turns into existence.

“Ah, Cardinal Rohan!” a second puppet calls from behind them. It’s the bare-breasted puppet from earlier. Wait, does it count as bare-breasted if it’s just the one? “Fancy seeing you here!”

“Oh, hello, hello!” Rohan replies. “What….uh...what are you doing around Versailles?”

“Oh, you know,” Jeanne says significantly. “Just...paying a visit to a friend.”

“Oh, is that so?”

If one more damn puppet says “Oh”, Ryan’s shutting down the production.

“Heh, heh, heh,” Rohan cackles. “And who might that be?”

“Huh? Oh, oh, my friend? Oh, her royal--uh, oh, I mean...just some plain Jane you don’t know.”

Ryan’s annoyance with the dialogue flutters into something more sinister. This scene isn’t playing out as hoped. It almost sounds as though...

“Jeanne, whatever are you playing at?”

“Mmmmm, fine. It’s the queen! I’m friends with the queen. The queen is my best friend.”

Damn it! 

Kate gasps in intrigue. 

“That’s uh--” Ryan starts, but apparently the sketch isn’t over yet.

“It’s the biggest secret in the world, but yes, best friends for life. What more can I say, we’re just plain friends.”

That’s the riveting dialogue that required the scene to be dragged out unnecessarily? “Booo! Boo!”

“Who wrote that?” Kate gushes. The thrones slam into their fuzzy little knees, swiping their legs out from under them. “That was amazing. That was a beautiful play.”

“The script sucks,” Ryan grouches. “I don’t like the history!” Well, if he were to be completely honest with himself, “I don’t like it cause I wasn’t right.”

“When in doubt, pick C,” Kate informs him sagely. 

“God damn it,” Ryan says facetiously. “The prophecy fulfills itself.” It’s okay. It’s still early in the lesson. There’s still time to reclaim the lead.

“HuAH!” The Professor yelps, erupting from the curtain to land atop his squared-off shrubbery. 

“Oh, there he is!”

“So, yeah,” The Professor says nonchalantly. “She lied to him. So Kate gets the point! A history point.”

Kate ooohs a little too much for Ryan’s liking.

“So Rohan was, uhhh, obviously not in a position to confirm or deny this. May have sounded outlandish, but since the queen was known to buck tradition, maybe it wasn’t! So he ate it up! Rohan was eager to have Jeanne put in a good word for him. So she offered him a great opportunity. _Write the queen a letter!_ So, he did! There’s no surviving copy of it, but he likely apologized for dunking on her mom.”

Kate promptly falls prey to a fit of giggles.

“And wouldn’t ya know it, the Queen wrote back! Except obviously it was Jeanne, just straight up catfishing him! After exchanging secret letters with the queen for nearly a month without so much as a glance from her, Rohan was getting antsy. He wanted to meet with her, and soon. And believe it or not, Jeanne saw to it on the night of August 12th.”

“Oh, I hope there’s disguises,” Ryan wishes. “Please. Wait, wait--”

“What? What?”

“At this point, do they know--”

“What? What do you want?”

“The person who was being catfished, did he know he was being--”

“Rohan,” The Professor interjects. 

Ryan waves him away. “Yeah, does Jeanne look strikingly similar to the queen?”

“Not particularly,” The Professor says shiftily. Ryan is all ready to push for more details when The Professor tacks on, “Rohan is much more acquainted with Jeanne than with the queen. So, where were we? August 12th! Here we go!”

The sun swivels, casting them momentarily into complete darkness just as their thrones jettison them into well-groomed hedges. When the sun swivels back around, it has become a moon, and The Professor is out of sight.

“The sprawling darkness of Versailles, on a starlight night,” The Professor says. “Enter, sneakily, Rohan.”

Rohan’s two-dimensional figure bursts through The Professor’s shrubbery. “It’s me. The Rohan. Standing alone in the garden. Chillin’ hard. Sure would be a _shock_ if any queens appeared here tonight!”

“Crickets,” The Professor announces. There are no crickets, just an overwhelmingly ominous silence. Ryan shifts uneasily.

“Hmmm, I knew it,” huffs Rohan. “What a pile of nuts!”

Ryan would pet his weight in jellybeans that that’s not--and never has been-- a phrase that anyone actually uses.

“Suddenly, from the bushes, a rustling, and who should emerge?” 

Ryan is honestly so creeped out by The Professor narrating into dead silence. What, can he not rustle? Can he not play a cricket sound effect?

“Who goes there?” Rohan demands. “I’ll kill you!” 

Ryan is opening his mouth to take the out and run the errand to Ms. Perez, but then another figure pops out of the shrubbery.

“Ma...ma...my queen!” Rohan gasps. “Wha, wha, wha-wha-wha what?!?”

“She extends a letter.” 

This Professor narration is absolute bullshit. This is even worse than usual.

“You know what this means.”

“No, I don’t!”

“I have to go now. Goodbyeeeeeeeee.” She spins out of existence. 

Rohan flips to look back and forth between his audience and the woman, disappearing into a sliver of paper. “Huhhhhh?”

“What?” Ryan says. What is even the point of this sketch?

“What’d the letter say?” Kate asks.

Yeah, Kate. That’s what’s important. “Was she a ghost?” Ryan demands as the thrones swing in to scoop them up. Ryan hops up so the edge doesn’t delve deeper than his fur.

“Rah!” The Professor shouts from the folds of the undulating red curtain. He bursts out atop of his shrubbery, and as he does, the sky turns violently red. “Okay! Weird! What do you think just happened? A, Jeanne donned a powdery wig and Jedi rob and pretended to be Marie Antoinette; B, Jeanne hired her husband’s mistress to pretend to be Marie Antoinette; or C, This is fanfiction written by Rohan in his memoirs.”

“Ohhhhhh, my God!” Kate gasps.

Ryan reaches for his board. “That’s tough.”

“Rohan did talk a lot of shit, so I wouldn’t put it past him to say that he met the queen, but he didn’t meet the queen, you know?”

“Yeah, yeah, true,” Ryan agrees, carefully writing his answer. He’s liking how Kate’s talking through her answer out loud. 

“Sure, sure,” The Professor seconds.

“But,” Kate continues deliberately, “he had no reason to lie about it because he thought he was getting actual letters from the queen.”

“He did,” The Professor agrees again. Ryan’s not perturbed. He’s locked in. Memoirs are written about past events, and this French dude must eventually find out that the whole thing is a lie. Besides, The Professor acted all shifty before the sketch when Ryan was asking about disguises and Jeanne looking like the queen. C’s the only one that it could be.

“So it kinda feels like maybe it was the mistress, but why would she hire her husband’s mistress?”

“Well,” The Professor says, “I guess you’ll have to pick one.” No shit. Kate’s really taking all day on these. She contemplates the answer for a moment more before The Professor’s words sink in.

“Oh, yeah,” Kate chuckles. “I guess we can’t just sit around talking about it all day.”

“Ryan, have you chosen?”

Ryan nods. His head rolls bonelessly on his neck. “I think I have.”

“What are you gonna go with?”

“I think this is fanfic,” Ryan says, flopping his board around. 

“Okay, Kate?”

“Oh, god,” Kate says. “I went with master of disguise. I went with A.”

“I hope it’s A,” Ryan says charitably. After all, it’s the one he had in mind before the question was even asked.

“Okay, all right--” 

“I think it’s C,” Kate says dejectedly.

“Well, it turns out, Jeanne’s husband was gettin’ a little love on the side with a woman who very much resembled Marie Antoinette. So without telling her much, they dolled her up and had her act the part!” 

No fucking way. That’s insane. Who goes Ocean’s 11 with their husband’s mistress? 

“Points to no one!” The Professor continues. “Do you think Rohan bought it?”

“Yes,” Kate says without hesitation. 

“Yeah, I think so too.”

“He bought the hell out of it,” The Professor says emphatically. 

“Yeah,” Ryan says. Not that he’d ever have a mistress or second girlfriend or anything, but if he did, he sure as hell wouldn’t fucking introduce them. What a loony. “I’m sure he did.”

“To such a degree that he didn’t even bat an eye when the queen wrote him asking to donate 60,000 pounds to a family in need or, a few months later, when the queen also asked him for an additional 100,000 pounds. Coincidentally, Jeanne bought a nice house for her and her husband around this time. So Jeanne just starts sending him bunch of letters, being like, ‘It’s me! The queen! Hey, I need money!’”

“Yo!” Kate says approvingly. Her approval is contagious. Ryan has to admit it’s pretty baller for someone to impersonate royalty to scam money off a dweeb.

“And he’s like, ‘Alright.’”

“I want green!” Kate says.

“She does rule,” Ryan agrees. “That’s pretty great.”

“That’s so freaking cool. She was all business. She didn’t care about her husband having a little mistress.”

The Professor bobs his head. “No, she was like, ‘We can use this.’”

“Yeah.” Kate straightens up her posture, which must be her way of doing impressions, because when she speaks, it doesn’t sound even remotely old-timey. “‘I’m gonna get myself a veranda.’” 

“‘We can work with this!’” The Professor says. He takes a moment to compose himself before returning to the lesson. “Now with Rohan firmly on the hook, it was time for Jeanne to really crank them screws. And here’s where the world’s most expensive necklace comes into play. According to Johnathan Beckman, quote, ‘The necklace comprised 647 diamonds weighing 2,800 carats...grotesque and almost literally unbearable, it more resembled an item of chainmail more than a coveted piece of jewellery.’”

Ryan has no idea how much a carat weighs or how much space 647 diamonds would occupy, but the chainmail comparison is painting a pretty vivid picture. This necklace sounds terrible, and Ryan knows literally nothing about necklaces.

“The necklace had been commissioned as a gift by former King Louis the XV, but as it was such a monstrosity, the jewelers, known as the Boehmers, weren’t able to finish the thing before he kicked the bucket in 1774. Desperate to sell the necklace that most people short of royalty probably could never afford, they had previously offered the sale to Marie Antoinette. Beckman describes their exchange, and for once, this scene will have some allegedly accurate dialogue.”

The thrones pivot hard to jettison them to the ground. As they tumble, Kate shouts up, “Now, we didn’t not like the dialogue from the other scenes.”

“Huh?” The Professor shouts down. The only part of his body that is visible is his head peeping out over the edge of the red velvet curtain.

“Speak for yourself,” Ryan calls in a loud aside.

“You thought it was good?” The Professor asks Kate uncertainly.

“I did!”

“Thank you!”

“You’re welcome.”

“Don’t be so needy!” Ryan reprimands, but The Professor has disappeared out of sight. A moment later, The Professor’s voice rings through the courtyard. 

“In the palace of Versailles, a sweating jeweler falls to his knees in front of Marie Antoinette.”

A moaning man writhes on the ground. There’s a weird juxtaposition of his frozen joints and flopping, two-dimensional body. “Oooooh, oooh, ohh.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ryan breathes. A second puppet flips into existence. 

“Madame,” the jeweler puppet wails, “I am ruined and disgraced if you do not purchase my necklace. I cannot outlive so many misfortunes. When I leave here, I shall throw myself into the river!”

“Rise, Boehmer,” Marie Antoinette says grandly. “I do not like these rhapsodies. If you were to kill yourself, I should reget…” She pauses and coughs daintily. “If you were to kill yourself, I should regret it as the act of a madman in whom I have taken an interest, but I would not hold myself responsible.”

Kate hums in agreement. She’s eating up this interaction word for word.

“I told you in person that I refused to buy that necklace,” Marie Antoinette continues fiercely. “The king wished to give it to me, but I refused him also. Never mention it again to me. Divide it and try to sell it piecemeal, and do not drown yourself. Never let me see you behave in this way again. Go!”

“Wow, dope!” Kate cheers.

Damn, that’s steel. “Oh, man.” Ryan’s too distracted by Kate’s enthusiasm to notice the thrones swooping down and takes a hard hit to the back of the legs as he’s scooped back up. It doesn’t hurt in the same way it would if he were human; it’s less of a bruising and move of a full-body muscle spasm.

“She frickin’ knows how to instill boundaries!”

True, but, “I mean, she also just shunned him hard.” Like, girl power and all that, but Ryan’s definitely been in the shoes of the guy who’s been shot down before. Not in like, a buyer-seller way; more of a hey-I-have-a-crush-on-you-oh-fuck-you’re-not-even-a-little-bit-interested way.

Kate is only getting more amped. “She was like, ‘No, bitch! Fix it. You’re in this situation? Fix it!’”

Fair point. That’s also true. Like, yeah, she could have been nicer about it, but it’s not like it’s Antoinette’s fault that the jewelry guy is bad off. “She ain’t gonna fall for those crocodile tears.”

“‘And if you kill yourself, it’s not my fault.’”

“Yeah,” The Professor nods. “What a power play.”

“Not falling for the crocodile tears,” Ryan repeats, a little louder in case no one heard him the first time.

“A respectable lady,” The Professor announces. 

“Wow,” Kate says approvingly. Her plastic eyes look particularly glossy.

“Yeah, it’s good.”

Okay, apparently it’s let’s-all-ignore-Ryan’s-commentary-o’clock. Cool.

“Somewhat unsurprising, based on that exchange, that in January of 1785, Rohan received yet another letter from the queen and she wanted the necklace. But for reasons undisclosed, she preferred Rohan to take care of the transaction. And look, we’re not here to pick on the guy, but Rohan is really turning out to be quite the chump here.”

No kidding.

“Assuming the queen was maybe just hiding this transaction from the king, Rohan happily agreed to broker the deal with the delighted jewelers. A price was agreed upon: 1.6 million pounds, paid over time, with an initial payment of 400,000 pounds within the first six months. Days later, Rohan finalized the sale with the jewelers and chauffeured the necklace from Paris to the La Motte’s residence at Versailles. Question!” The moon turns bloodred. “What happens next? A, Rohan is ambushed and robbed on the street by a cohort of Jeanne’s; B, Rohan insists on taking the necklace directly to the queen; or C, Rohan hands the necklace to a man he’s never met before.”

Kate groans. “I don’t know.”

“Just pick one, it’s okay,” The Professor says encouragingly. 

“I want the cup,” Kate explains. “No, I want to win.”

No, no, and no. Ryan was lowkey hoping that Kate was focusing more of the story than the prize. “Alright, whatever,” he says casually.

“It’s just history points,” The Professor says. 

“Alright,” Ryan interrupts. “I’m locked in, Doc.”

“Alright.”

“Let’s go with A.”

“You’re going with A.”

“Just to continue the chumpness,” Ryan explains. “The most chumpy thing I can think of is going to make this deal where you’re already getting ripped off--”

“Sure.”

“--and to get robbed by that person in the street just for funsies.”

“And Kate?”

Kate’s hunched over her board like a miserable goblin. “I’m going with B.”

“You’re going with B?” The Professor repeats.

“That was my second choice,” Ryan informs them. 

“He insists on taking the necklace directly to the queen.”

“Yeah,” Kate says miserably. “I think he did.”

“Well,” The Professor replies cheerily. “Let’s find out what happened. Whoo!” 

“Jesus!” Ryan yelps as the thrones whip them around so fast that they go flying into one of the palace windows wherein the Jeanne puppet waits with her flat, dead eyes. 

“Jeanne, baby,” she mutters to herself, “you’ve really nailed this. Mama’s hit the big time.”

“A rapping at the door,” The Professor’s voice floats through the window. There’s a beat of silence before Jeanne speaks again.

“Uh, oh, uh...come on in.” The Marie Antoinette puppet flips out to stare them down. “Oh, Rohan!”

“That’s Marie,” Ryan says.

“Oh, shit.” There’s something joyously blasphemous about hearing a teacher curse. Marie Antoinette begins to spin, gathering speed with each rotation. “Let me take this from the top, huh?”

Not exactly like they have an option.

“A rapping at the door.” The narration strikes uncannily in the otherwise silent scene, where the only motion is the Antoinette doll still spinning too fast to distinguish. 

“Oh, uh, come on in,” Jeanne repeats. The Marie puppet stops suddenly, but it’s no longer the queen. “Oh, Rohan!”

“Hello!” Rohan replies. 

“What timing! I was just meditating on my very cool, very real friendship with Marie Antoinette. Hey, where’s that necklace?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” Rohan answers, hobbling closer to Jeanne. “Here it is, the dreadful thing!” His empty hand slips against Jeanne’s.

Jeanne’s entire body tilts slightly backwards. “Oh, I can’t wait to sell this thing!” 

“What was that?” Rohan asks.

“I can’t wait,” Jeanne overennunciates, “to tell the queen what a champ you’ve been!”

Rohan hobbles back a couple of steps. “Oh, bless your wonderful, honest heart.”

“A rapping at the door.”

God, there’s something incredibly chilling about The Professor’s voice floating through the window, sounding as clear as though he were standing right next to Ryan.

“Uh, well,” Jeanne says. “That will be the queen’s necklace fetcher. Be a treat and hide behind that, uh, potted plant over there!”

“That sounds reasonable!” Rohan exclaims. Ryan pushes his paw into his forehead. It’s not a sufficient outlet for the degree of chumpness taking place. The floor rolls underfoot, hurling Ryan and Kate back out the window and into their chairs. Ryan hits the back of his seat face-first. His head snaps back to bounce off his back as he falls to the bottom of the throne. 

“So,” The Professor says brightly, utterly unperturbed by the sight of his pupils being tossed around like sacks of grain. “Rohan actually let a complete stranger just walk off with what may be the most expensive pile of rocks known to man. And--” 

Woah, woah, woah. Not so fast. Ryan scrambles to to flop his body back into sitting position. “You never gave me my point.”

“Huh?”

Ryan finally gets himself straightened back out in his throne. “You never gave me my point.”

The Professor cocks his head at Ryan. “Nobody gets a point. You both got it wrong.”

No, no, no. Ryan was the one that said another guy got the necklace. Kate said that he’s tried to take it to the queen herself. 

“It was C,” Kate says helpfully. “Remember when I said, that, when in doubt, go with C, and then I didn’t?”

“Yeah.”

Damn it. They’re right. Ryan picked the one where Rohan had the necklace taken forcefully. He got too caught up in Kate having the wrong answer to face the fact that he had the wrong one too. “My brain’s melting right now.”

“Yeah,” Kate echoes, shaking her head sadly. 

“You’ve done it this time, Peterman!” The Professor says in mock disapproval.

Kate shakes a paw at the moon. “It’s the damn SATs all over again!”

“So Rohan actually let a complete stranger just walk off with what may be the most expensive pile of rocks known to man, and Jeanne bought herself even more time by telling him that the queen probably wouldn’t wear the necklace ‘til she summoned the courage to tell King Louis about it.”

“Wow,” Kate sighs in admiration.

“Smart,” The Professor says. “Just plain smart.”

“She is Joanne the Scammer.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good,” Ryan says just to interject because he’s not appreciating how readily Kate and The Professor are vibing.

“Obviously, Jeanne and her husband immediately dismantled the necklace. Then he went to Paris to sell the stones at a loss for 240,000 pounds.”

Kate’s mouth drops. “That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I feel like he pocketed some.”

The Professor shakes his head. “Also, you got to understand he took it to several jewelers and most of them...it’s like...it would be like trying to sell someone a stealth jet.” 

What?! 

“They were like, ‘Why on Earth would anyone be trying to sell this pile of millions of dollars of--’”

“Rubies!” Kate exclaims. 

“Diamonds,” The Professor corrects long-sufferingly. 

“In case you have to sneak around,” Ryan decides. He’s still trying to think why someone would, in earnest, try to sell--or buy, for that matter- a stealth jet. 

“So despite his overly trusting nature,” The Professor presses on, “Rohan was getting nervous the queen had yet to wear the necklace. The jewelers were also getting nervous and, on the fifth of August, Boehmer went directly to the queen, and in meeting with her, laid out the details of the transaction. And guess what? She was pissed. That was the fifth of August. On the sixth of August, at two in the morning, Jeanne la Motte left town. Days later at the queen’s Patronal feast, Rohan was tapped on the shoulder by the king’s guards. He’d long suspected he was being duped, but only now realized the extent of it. According to Beckman, when put before the king and queen and asked about the necklace, he sheepishly uttered, ‘It is true, sire. I have been tricked.’”

That’s like, objectively hilarious. 

The Professor giggles. “That’s so sad.”

“So they rubbed his face in the poop,” Ryan says.

“Yeah.”

“Just like you would with a newborn puppy.”

“Well,” Kate says, “isn’t it--” She pauses, head cocked at an angle.

“That’s amazing,” Ryan sighs happily. He can visualize the scene. 

Kate stares at Ryan with total perplexion. “What?”

“Rohan was said to be visibly shaking and, after the conversation, he begged them to spare him the shame and scandal of being publically arrested.” The Professor peers at Kate and Ryan over the top of his glasses. “He was publically arrested.”

Kate immediately breaks into laughter, and Ryan joins in. The Rohan guy can’t catch a break.

“Luckily,” The Professor continues, “Rohan had just enough time to slip his servant a note instructing him to ride to Paris as fast as he could and burn all his documents. His servants took him seriously and rode so fast and so hard that--”

“Oh,” Kate says.

In perfect synchronization, she and The Professor say,” His horse died.”

“--as soon as he arrived in Paris,” The Professor finishes.

Poor horse. It’s been a bit of a trend in the obscure stories Madej teaches. “You know,” Ryan muses, “the horses are always the unsung heroes of most of these stories.”

“They’re…” The Professor says,” They are suffering.”

“Yeah. You ever think about horses on the battlefield? Just getting peppered by bullets and muskets?”

“All the frickin’ time,” Kate says somberly. “I think about it all the time.”

Woah, way to be a mood killer, Kate. “But you gotta think those horses, when they’re all, like, lined up in battle, they’re thinkin’ ‘This is sick. I’m here with all my bros.’”

“No,” Kate replies. “No. They’re good at…” She goes through a rapid internal conflict before decisively stating, “I was a horse girl. There. I said it. I was.”

“That’s fine,” The Professor says. He’s definitely looking for a way to reroute them back to his lesson. That shows him to throw in unnecessary extra pieces of information.

“That’s a strong admission,” Ryan teases.

“The key word there is _was_ ,” The Professor says, but before he can move back to his lesson, Kate goes-

“I still love horses.”

The Professor visibly gives up on redirecting the conversation. “Uh oh.” 

“I don’t, like, have stickers of them in my apartment--”

“Relapse,” Ryan calls.

“--because I can’t put stickers on my wall.”

“Sure,” The Professor says.

“But I do love horses,” Kate assures them. “But they’re very intuitive.”

“If they were really intuitive, wouldn’t they just be like, ‘Nah, I’m not running. I’m gonna go back to the barn.”

“Oh yeah,” The Professor says.

Kate crosses her puppet arms. “Well, they get branded and shit.”

“How about, ‘Give me some hay. Maybe a sweet little apple covered in sugar?’” 

Ryan laughs delightedly. The Professor is officially off-track. “‘Hey, buddy, how about an apple before I run into that hail of bullets?’”

“God, I love sugar cubes,” The Professor says. Ryan’s not sure if he’s speaking for a hypothetical horse or himself, or maybe even as Mr. Madej. 

“I got a lot to think about,” Kate says, her glossy eyes staring out beyond the confines of their Puppet History space.

“Meanwhile,” The Professor says in a valiant attempt to get back on track. “In Clairvaux, 150 miles east of Versailles, Jeanne was also casually setting things on fire, according to her memoirs. She’s very chill about this. She said, quote, ‘Having received intelligence that the cardinal was in the Bastille, I employed myself near two hours in burning all the letters and notes which I then recollected to have in my possession between the queen and the cardinal. In short, I thought it my duty to remove all vestiges or a correspondence between the cardinal and the queen.”

“Whoa,” Kate says thoughtfully.

“So even…” Ryan pauses to get his words in order. “She’s thinking about her legacy, even in the future.”

“Yeah.”

“It wasn’t enough that she accomplished the crime.”

“Exactly.”

Hmm. “A little revisionist.” Ryan can get behind that. “That’s pretty cool, actually.”

“I really like her,” Kate announces.

“She’s covering her bases.”

“She’s baller,” The Professor says.

“I just feel,” Kate say heartily, “like she did a great job.”

“She did a great job!” The Professor agrees.

“I feel like she should take that money, hop a boat, get out of there, start a new life with all that stolen money...well, not stolen--”

Uh no, the money came from stealing a necklace. It counts as stolen. She doesn’t get to come out of this story looking like a good guy. Ryan looks at The Professor to correct Kate.

“Sure,” The Professor says amicably. 

“Well,” Ryan says, because someone has to set the record straight, “she...but she did.” He’s not feeling anti-Jeanne at the moment, and Rohan definitely should have seen it coming, but they’re surely not about to act like Jeanne is clean-cut.

“She stole it,” Kate shrugs. “She 100% stole it. My bad.”

“So she was arrested the following day and would now join Rohan in the cells of Bastille as they awaited trial. It started out as a grift. How did it end up like this?”

Ryan stares suspiciously at The Professor. That sounded suspiciously like an outdated music reference.

Kate is rolling around in her chair, laughing her heart out. “It was only a grift, it was only a grift!”

In lieu of rolling his eyes, Ryan flops his head back to stare at the sky. It’s...it’s different. Ryan can’t quite put his finger on it, but the moon is a little too bright and the sky a velvety void. It’s smothering. Ryan tries to straighten his head back upright, but he has to sorta snap his neck to get enough momentum. It’s hard moving without muscles. He’s distracted from his growing uneasiness with the uncanny roof of the puppet world by The Professor droning on.

“The formal investigation began a few months later in January, and it lasted for months. The trial itself became a national obsession and it’s as long and as fascinating as the caper that caused it; however, we simply don’t have time to cover it in detail, or at least the detail it deserves. So, you know, read some books about it.”

“Alright,” Ryan says, “don’t give me a homework assignment, bud.” He gets enough from Mr. Madej as it is; the last thing he needs is puppet homework.

“Well, I am The Professor!”

“With no accreditation,” Ryan points out. He’s a little curious now: will The Professor claim Madej’s laurels and degree?

“I went to Puppet U.”

Kate coos. Ryan wiggles to the edge of his chair and challenges, “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” The Professor says nonchalantly. “I’m a PU alum.”

“PU!” Kate could do with being a little less delighted, in Ryan’s totally unbiased opinion. Ryan’s all ready to push for more details, but he’s distracted by The Professor shouting and world turning bloodred.

“Question time! How do you think things turned out for these two banana heads? A, both were sentenced to death! B, Jeanne pinned it all on Rohan. Or C, Jeanne’s story crumbled like a house of cards.”

They’ve got to be drawing close to the end. This might even be the last question. Ryan side-eyes Kate, who’s already writing her answer down. He’s pretty sure he knows what her answer is going to be. Damn, he meant to be keeping track of points. Will it be sufficient to put the same answer? Does he need to pull ahead? Ryan has a truly exceptional case of dry mouth as he squeaks out his answer on the white board. “Alright.”

“Ryan,” The Professor barks. “What d’ya got?”

Ryan flips his board around, immediately scoping out reactions. “I’m gonna go with C.”

“It all fell apart.” The Professor’s voice is terribly blank. 

“I think it all fell apart,” Ryan says. “You did mention she’s in jail, so--”

“Well,” The Professor says, “she was in jail awaiting trial.”

“Whoops!” Kate cackles. 

Ryan hmms irritably at her, and she merrily continues.

“I went with B.”

“You went with B,” The Professor confirms.

“I think she pinned it all on Rohan,” Kate says. 

For several long seconds, The Professor just looks back and forth between them waiting and holding their answer boards. Then he flurries back to his lecture. “In the end, Rohan revealed several holes in Jeanne’s story, unmasking her as the mastermind behind the outlandish plot.”

Yes! Yes, yes, YES! Eat it, Peterman!

“Jeanne was sentenced to whipping, branding, and imprisonment. Rohan was sentenced to apologize to the queen, resign from his various positions, and was henceforth banned from Versailles when the royal couple was in residence. Pretty light.”

“So he could only not be in the city when they’re there,” Ryan muses. It’s a lot easier to give a shit about expired French nobility without the question-answering stress.

“Yeah,” The Professor says. “They show up, he’s gotta be like…’Ooooh, goodbye.’”

Kate stares at her board like it has betrayed her. “So it was C.”

“It was C,” Ryan says. He honestly thought Kate would pick that, especially with her constantly talking about picking C if the answer is unknown. What a stroke of luck for her to not follow her own advice!

“It was C. Point...point for Ryan. History point for Ryan.” The Professor doesn’t sound happy about it. The Professor can suck it.

“Is that the end of the questions?” Kate asks miserably.

“Lots of fanfare to that.”

“No, there may be one more question. Who knows?” There’s a little clicking noise, and the moon melts back to its original bleached bright white. 

Ryan’s feeling confident. The sky’s the limit. “So I guess we’ll see here.”

“Well, Rohan would leave the Bastille to cheering crowds as the public came to view him as an unwitting victim in the whole messy plot, which he kind of was. As for the queen, her reputation was permanently sullied by the whole thing with commoners swapping conspiracy theories about her actual involvement in the whole plot. Did she actually buy the necklace and pin it on these rubes? Was it all a plot to get back at Rohan? This was sort of the first instance of the public losing faith in Marie Antoinette and, you know…” The Professor looks at Ryan.

“Woah,” Kate breathes.

The Professor does the barest little nod, like he’s seen something in Ryan’s unexpressionable face that he was looking for. “Eventually they would have that ol’ French revolution and behead her.”

There is a poorly timed laugh gurgling up through Ryan. “That must have been--”

“Oh, that’s right,” Kate sighs. “I forgot.”

“--such an ugly necklace.”

Apparently Kate doesn’t recognize high-class humor, because she just says, “No, I think it was beautiful, but they just couldn’t wear it.”

“I mean,” The Professor shrugs, “Louis the XV commissioned it, so maybe it was more his style? It did say it had, like--”

Yeah, what’s up with the Louis guy, making chainmail jewelry? “He does seem, like, weird.”

“--chalet-sized diamonds on it, which--”

“I would wear it,” Kate declares. 

Pft. Kate can hardly hold her head upright at the moment, and she’s talking big game about wearing the heaviest necklace ever conceived? 

“As for Jeanne-- that scrappy schemer with a drop of nobility in her blood, chasing after her dream through nefarious means only to end up in the slammer-- well, let’s have one last shot at history points here.” The moon ruddies. “Whatever happened to Jeanne la Motte? A, she parted ways with her own head via guillotine; B, she escaped prison by dressing up as a boy; or C, she fell down a well in the prison yard.”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Kate groans. “Boy, ohhhh! God! Dang it!”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Ryan says, all artificial sweetness. 

“Ryan,” The Professor says tremulously. “What’s it gonna be?”

“I’m gonna go with A. Seeing as she was a commoner, I don’t think they’re gonna take what she did lightly.” Like, come on. Heads were rolling right and left during the French revolution. They’ve talked about the guillotine all lesson long. The Professor even just emphasized that she had a little noble blood, and that’s what the French commoners were all about spilling. Even if she wasn’t executed for the necklace thing, the odds are there was a little chop-chop action going on at the end of the story.

“And Kate?”

“I put B, she escaped as a boy.” Kate pats her board consolingly. “But I think it was C. But I didn’t write that.”

“I would love for it to be C,” Ryan says generously. He’s getting major Lassie vibes from that one, which is fun. But he’s not here for fun. He’s here to win.

“Point to Kate!” The Professor declares, with absolutely none of his usual story prefacing. 

No! Nooooooooooooooo. Absolutely not!

“She dressed up as a boy and escaped prison. Yeah.”

“Wait. What?”

“Can you believe it?”

“I can’t believe!” Ryan’s still waiting for The Professor to go, _Haha, fooled you! It’s totally A and a point to Ryan._ “That’s insane.” In the full scope of cinema productions with women pretending to be a man, not one of them has passed off as remotely convincing. How would a prison not spot a woman in men’s clothing, especially before prosthetics were a thing?

“Yeah,” Kate says. She looks more surprised than gleeful, and Ryan momentarily feels like a rotten human being about how much he wants to beat her. He gets over it fast though.

“I thought there was no chance that one was right.” 

“She just kinda...a lot of people think that maybe she did have friends in high places who, after the whole thing played out, felt kinda bad for her and arranged for her to be able to escape, but once she escaped, they never really bothered to haul her back in. So she kinda had a bit of a happy ending. Wrote a huge memoir that was--”

“Best seller,” Kate interjects.

“Pretty much everyone in this story wrote their own memoir--”

“Sick,” Ryan says, despite it being possibly one of the least sick things he’s ever heard. He needs the scores, and he needs them now.

“--and told their story of the event.”

Kate makes a thoughtful noise. 

“Huh,” says The Professor, and then his energy perks up. “So it was crazy! That concludes our history lesson. I’m going to go tally up the scores to see who receives the coveted cup and the title of _History Master_. While I do that, please enjoy this special performance from, oh! It’s the infamous diamond necklace!”

“Oh God.” How did Ryan forget about this part?

“What?” Kate looks around like she thinks she’s missing something.

Well, maybe the necklace didn’t hear Ryan calling it ugly earlier. God, how is that a thought he just had? What is his life? “Alright,” Ryan says resignedly. As soon as this is over and the scores are tallied, he’s free. He can survive a diamond song.

“I’m so excited,” Kate whispers, and then their thrones are tossing them unceremoniously into the top of The Professor’s hedge. They descend through several layers of branches before hitting a hollow center and tumbling onto an empty dance floor. It starts growing brighter, and Ryan looks up in time to see the moon pushing into the top of the shrub, breaking branches as it descends closer and closer. He pushes against the wall of the bush in a frenzied attempt at escape, but it’s unyielding. Thankfully, the moon stops once it has cleared the upper branches and begins to spin. Its luster morphs into straight-up sparkle. Ryan and Kate exchange bewildered looks, but quickly look back up as bits and pieces of glistening moon rock plummet to the ground.

“Hey everyone” the rocks say in unison. They move like one giant snake, coiling around into a little stack. “It’s me.”

“You gotta be kidding me.” Kate’s jaw drops to her chest.

“The pile of diamonds,” the rocks hiss. “Yeah, it’s me! That big pile of diamonds!”

_Well, I’m that pricy ice._

_Oh, but I’d look so nice_

_around that neck._

It’s a disco ball. The moon is turning into a damn disco ball, and Ryan and Kate are stuck at the bottom of a hollow hedge with zero wiggle room. 

_Marie Antoinette, she didn’t want me._

_She told me to my face that I was ugly._

_But I guess in the end, I got the upper hand_

_because they didn’t cut my head off._

Kate is, apparently, not impressed by their lack of space and starts attempting a little sway to the beat, which means that Ryan also has to because otherwise he’s just getting repeatedly elbowed.

_And, sure, they hacked me into tiny pieces--_

_a devastating thing for all my nieces._

_And yes, necklaces can have nieces_

_when they’re anthropomorphic._

Oh God, no. Please say there are no more personified bits of jewelry coming out.

_I was just a pile of jewels,_

_made Rohan look like a fool,_

_but a fella should know better_

_than to trust a simple letter,_

_so I guess if there’s a lesson_

_to this whole back-stabbin’ mess then_

_it’s that if you think you know the queen_

_to make sure that you know the queen!_

_Like has she ever talked to you_

_or looked at you or smiled at you_

_or even seemed to think of you_

_or met you in the daytime?_

Ryan realizes his head is bobbing to the beat. He considers trying to stop it, but, then again, does it matter? He can appreciate something inside of Puppet History. It's not like that'd hurt him.

_Maybe ask her for her license_

_or to pose with today’s paper._

_And if she doesn’t want to then,_

_my dude, I think it ain’t her_. 

Ryan watches the pile of diamonds disintegrate and blow away. “That was actually pretty..not that bad.”

“This is so good,” Kate says. She’s such a sucker for teacher humor, but in this one particular instance, he can’t honestly disagree.

“That was actually not that bad.” 

The ground rumbles underfoot, giving zero time fore Kate or Ryan to react before shooting them up towards the moon, which thankfully also is being spat back into the sky. Ryan and Kate arch through the air and smash down back into their thrones.

“Oh my god,” Kate says.

“The stack of diamonds has bars,” Ryan says, a little tongue in cheek. It’s taken Kate long enough to wig out about the puppet world.

“Truly,” Kate agrees, and Ryan facepalms hard. She’s still just in awe about the song? How the hell is she so unflappable? 

“Wow,” The Professor says, stepping out of the red velvet curtain, which spreads like a carpet over his hedge to stop him from falling though. “That guy was really good.”

“Yeah,” Kate says. Ryan pauses while trying to right himself in his seat to look quizzically at The Professor.

“What a songwriter.”

“Yeah.”

Ryan finishes situating himself back in his throne. “Don’t compliment yourself.” 

“Huh?” The Professor croaks, all fake innocent-y. Like he knows that he’s related to the diamond necklace. Like he does have some self-awareness.

“You son of a b--” Ryan starts, but he pauses when he realizes that he’s about to _curse out a teacher_ and that’ll land him mega trouble.

“Well,” The Professor says, not at all bothered about Ryan’s near miss. “Let’s see how we did. Uh...tallying up the scores, Ryan and Kate, you both made it out with two history points! It’s a tie.”

Ryan realizes he’s not surprised about it. Not upset about it. Just sorta...resigned. “Is there no sudden death?”

“No, there’s no sudden death,” The Professor says. “You share it.” 

If there’s no sudden death...shit! Ryan was a total idiot from the get-go. There’s no way that Kate could have taken the title of resident competitor: she’s not in Madej’s class. No matter how this ended, it’s not like Mr. Madej was going to pull her out of Fulmer’s class whenever he did a future Puppet History. Winning was a doomed endeavor from the second he picked Kate.

“You can have it, Ryan,” Kate says. The curtain stretches out to connect the thrones and the hollow hedge. Ryan gets up to fetch the trophy. The Professor stares at him as Ryan picks it up, an empty victory, and ferries it back to Kate.

“We can just hold it like this,” Ryan says, perching it between them. Kate supports the trophy from the other side, and her face stretches long in delight. 

“Is it full of jellybeans?”

“Yeah,” The Professor calls.

“It is,” Ryan says. “They’re actually pretty good.”

“Sure it is,” The Professor says. His voice sounds borderline melancholy, but Ryan isn’t paying too much attention because he’s currently doing his best to ferret out a bean to eat.

“I love jellybeans.”

“I know.”

It’s not funny, but Ryan chuckles nonetheless as he manages to wrangle a jellybean into his paw and toss it into his mouth.

“Thanks for watching Puppet History everybody. We’ll see you next time!”

“Ooh,” Ryan hums. “I got a root beer one.” The flavor is faint, a whisper of what flavor is in the real world, but way more than Ryan was anticipating.

“Kate,” The Professor says, “Thank you for being here.”

“Oh, I had so much fun!” Kate replies. 

Ryan dumps some more jellybeans into his hand.

“Goodbye!” Madej says.

“Goodbye! I learned so much!”

Kate closes the classroom door, and the sound makes Ryan look up. He’s sitting on his throne in the front of the classroom, clutching the jellybeans like his life depends on it. His chest is hurting, burning, and he realizes that he’s not breathing.

He doesn’t remember how to breathe. 

“Go put The Professor back.” Mr. Madej passes Ryan the swaddled puppet.

“Yeah, okay,” Ryan coughs, and it hurts, but he’s finally breathing again. His head really hurts. 

“And get some water for that cough,” Mr. Madej adds.

Ryan scurries out into the hallway and fights to catch his breath enough to take a sip of water. It’s not until he’s bracing himself over the water fountain that he finally slows down his breaths to something manageable. 

He takes a sip, and the water loosens something stuck in the back of his throat. Ryan coughs again, and again, and again.

He coughs until he finally ejects a little green matted furball. 

“The fu--?”

“You planning on staying in the hall all day, Mr. Bergara?” Mr. Madej asks from the classroom door. “Class isn’t over just yet.”

Ryan takes another swig of water before traipsing back over. Resolve is sparking in embers of his breathlessness. “I tied.” 

“You did,” Madej says. 

“That means you need two new competitors next time.”

“No,” Madej says. “I don’t think I will.” He waves Ryan back through the door.

The thing is? Ryan doesn’t disagree. He just goes back to his desk and tries to surreptitiously get jellybean residue off his teeth. Well, that, and he reasons to himself that this past lesson wasn’t awful. Maybe Madej would stick with the less morbid lessons now that Ryan’s said something about it.


End file.
